In Detroit, art isn’t just something to look at, writes Anna Clark in the first of a three-part series about urban transformation through the arts in Detroit.
Neither is it something to consume. Rather, it is an active part of civic life, cultivating community resilience by connecting people and places across the city’s 139 square miles. In a city where municipal bankruptcy and deindustrialization has shredded both the public and private sectors, artists and organizations have an unusually large impact—they are literally changing the landscape. Tens of thousands of vacant lots and buildings here mark the daily lived experience of citizens: artistic intervention, whether it is a mural painted on an empty building or an organized program, interrupts the disheartening pattern.
Write A House, a new nonprofit, is renovating vacant homes in Detroit and giving them away, for keeps, to talented writers. The program has attracted international attention as an unprecedented literary arts experiment, offering a lifetime of support to writers. But equally important is WAH’s impact on a residential neighborhood marred by vacancy, says Sarah F. Cox, WAH’s co-founder and vice-president. (In disclosure, I’m on the board of WAH.) The program currently owns three vacant homes in the same neighborhood, one of which is being renovated.
“Filling in three houses that had been vacant for a long time does change things,” Cox said, noting how persistent vacancy destabilizes a neighborhood and creates a dangerous landscape for residents. WAH members are also attending neighborhood safety meetings and working alongside residents, the local police, and their city council representative to “really give back to the community.” While tearing down vacant homes dominates the conversation about blight in Detroit, Cox said WAH offers a small but meaningful alternative model for how the city can address neighborhood vacancy.
When it comes to arts in Detroit, the collective creative impact broadens residents’ sense of what is possible for the city, tells the city’s story to others around the world, and facilitates imaginative re-thinking about what citizens have to contribute the place they call home.
And none of this is new.
