Reimagining Our Cities

Short Synopsis

Population loss and industrial collapse scar cities around the globe.  People in post-industrial, blighted neighborhoods are taking action to make their communities a better place to live.  While transitioning their cities from polluted wastelands to environmentally sustainable communities, these urban heroes tell an international story we all share.

Description/Treatment

Our expert interviews will pepper the film with information and context, but the stories will follow people who are living and working in the neighborhoods they are changing.  Where are these neighborhoods now?  How are they changed or how are they changing?

The film will begin by establishing post-industrial cities and their place in history as centers for manufacturing.  Historical footage supported by expert interviews will touch upon the number of people supported by factory jobs and thriving neighborhoods.  The pollution that these successful industries left for generations to clean up will be presented, along with how streams were turned into sewers, which left covered today, create flooding and groundwater problems. The environment is turning around and nature is returning to cities, like the beavers that had not been seen in the city of Detroit for over 75 years.  

Many cities besides Detroit have embraced the necessity of reimagining themselves in the wake of deindustrialization and population loss. Interestingly, a good number of cities have developed special areas of expertise – Detroit in community gardening, Philadelphia in public art and vacant lot restoration, Youngstown in community-based planning for a small but smarter city. With that in mind, Reimagining our Cities will look at each city as an exemplar of particular urban strategies. Among those:

Detroit, Michigan
Detroit, where urban agriculture is a star.  Small community gardens help reclaim blighted neighborhoods that displace drug dealers and prostitutes.  Larger garden projects provide locally grown food to people who don’t have access to many healthy choices in their neighborhoods, while also uniting people across various ethnic groups.  Grand-scale agriculture can provide jobs for an often uneducated, or even illiterate work-force.

Reit Schumack, moved into one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Detroit, one with the highest murder rates, and put a community garden next to a drug house - it was just the beginning of her work.  She rides through her neighborhood of small bungalow homes on the tractor she uses to maintain abandoned lots, “these people have been behind locked doors for the last twenty, thirty years, and are now coming out.”

Malik Yakini of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network and Patrick Crouch of Earthwork Farms literally get their hands dirty with their work in agriculture, and provide a historical and activist perspective to the work.  Attending community meetings with Malik and visiting the last black-owned supermarket in Detroit are on the list of additional footage required for production.  Gary Wozniak stands at the site of a future tilapia farm and envisions a new place of employment for residents of Detroit, who like himself, are recover addicts.

Community arts installations have also had a big impact, like the 25 year-old, internationally renowned Heidelberg Project that millennial Jessica Williams is engaging the next generation in, mentored by executive director Jenenne Whitfield.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Simple posted rail fences have been put up all over Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and adopted by Youngstown, Ohio. They have turned blighted neighborhoods into parks and increased housing values.  Murals have appeared on buildings and art installations have popped up that not only create beauty in depressed areas, but help tell the stories of the community.   Jane Golden of the Philadelphia Mural Arts Project tells how.

Bob Grossman of Philadelphia Green explains how blight has been eliminated with inexpensive, posted rail fences, increasing housing values in the process.   Janet Finegar describes how an abandoned factory was claimed by community residents and transformed into Liberty Lands, a park and community garden. 

Youngstown, Ohio
Kirk Noden, a community organizer, describes a Youngstown neighborhood where “it was easier to buy a gun than a tomato” and how the residents turned that around by shutting down corner liquor stores.  

Manchester, in northwest England, became the epicenter of the industrial revolution in the 1800s, but by 1970 had begun to lose its textiles, coal, steel, and other industries. The city has rebounded to a remarkable degree by embracing a shared-vision of economic revitalization based upon new digital entrepreneurship. Among those efforts, Ian Slater , deputy chief executive of the New East Manchester Ltd. non-profit group, has developed an entrepreneurial incubator hub in an abandoned warehouse using converted shipping containers as mini-office space for small start-up firms in the digital communications industry.

Elsewhere in Manchester, Will Alsop of the architectural firm Urban Splash designed and helped developed Manchester’s iconic CHIPS building, a colorful mixed-use project resembling a stack of chips (French fries) on vacant land that once held some of Manchester’s earliest cotton mills.

Leipzig, Germany
As a city in the former East German, Liepzig suffered a dramatic drop in population and saw a catastrophic loss of industry after German reunification in 1990. In the years since, however, Leipzig has regained population, revitalized its central downtown, and begun to create new greenbelts in the city’s vacant areas.

Leaders of this effort include Hinrich Lehmann-Grube , the former mayor of Leipzig, whose efforts helped renovate thousands of vacant rental apartment units in central Leipzig and who redeveloped the city’s iconic central train station as a downtown mall. Oliver Weigel , a former Leipzig planner now with Germany’s federal transport ministry for urban redevelopment, has worked to reimagine Leipzig for two decades.

Turin, Italy
Turin, the center of Italy’s automotive industry, used to be known as the Detroit of Italy. And, to an ever greater degree than Detroit, Turin saw its industrial base implode in the 1970s and afterward. Valentino Castellani , Turin’s two-term mayor who led the reimagining effort, helped reposition this distressed industrial town as a European cultural capital and host of the Winter Olympics.

Elisa Rosso is director of Torino Internazionale, which was set up in 1999 to promote urban regeneration and local development actions. Torino Internazionale brings together over 90 local stakeholders across all sectors to promote and monitor the implementation of the city’s strategic plans.

Change is possible, people have been working on it for years, it is happening, and it’s not just happening in one city.  Urban residents can learn from each other and build on others’ successes.   Reimagining our Cities will be both inspire and motive the public to action.