Rebecca Mazzei just wrote her
last article for the Metro Times as their arts editor. (She took a job at CCS as an assistant dean at
CCS)
"Constantly walking in the same surroundings, what could I do but dream?"
"Detroit, through misfortune, has one natural resource which every other major city in the world except for Paris, with its extensive parks system, covets: land space. It allows for many opportunities transforming the land or placing objects on it. Working with vacant land in some manner is probably the least expensive way to make transformation. You could change the city landscape more cost effectively than a $20 million building could."
"So many spots in this city seem as if they represent civilization's absence; we refer often to "empty" lots and "abandoned" buildings as our burial grounds of industrialization and capitalist enterprises. But that land bears centuries of footprints. Long ago, those who lived here believed in the intense influence of physical contact with nature — it was the very definition of existence. Maybe that's what is felt in tremors below the surface. The layers of "progress" have been peeled back. And like Whitfield says, now it's time to wake up the neighborhood, and let the rules change."
