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So could I welcome you to the LSC again? Great to see so many of you here, even though we were in competition with that minor television channel, BBC Television, which showed this wonderful film which you're about to see on Saturday. And there's been lots of discussion about the themes of this film, starting from the Today program this morning where Principal Andrews and I welcome you and we'll talk about you in a moment. Was able to give her views of what life is like in the heart of a city which is experiencing great difficulty. I'm Ricky Burdett. I'm the director of LSE Cities, which is in fact the first time that we present an event as one of the new centers at the school. Part of the Department of Sociology and a continuation of the Urban Age program which has been going on for a number of years. This is actually a three day fest of studying cities. We're in the middle of a very interesting series of discussions with colleagues from all over the world that Anne Power has brought together as part of the launch of her book on Phoenix Cities. And in a way what we're talking about today is very much the combinations of themes of growing cities, exploding cities, but also the other side of that coin which is shrinking cities, but cities which have some promise. And I think we will be talking about that later today. This event happened in many ways. It's very much what universities are about. It happened as I was walking out of this room on the 17th of November, when Richard Sennett and Saskia Sassen had had a sort of family dialogue, I think you could call it, on their views of what the whole environmental and climate change agenda was about. It happened to have another 400 people in the room. But it was an extraordinary event and very inspiring for many others. And Roger Graef, who was not feeling very well as we walked outside, said to me in Italian, I'm not sure why, but it worked. Detroit or fat? Un film lai visto. Detroit. I've made a film. Have you seen it? And I was very happy to be able to respond in Italian, no, but I would like to hear more about it. And at dinner we talked a little bit about what Richard and Saskia had said, but much more, I have to say, having sat next to Roger about the excitement of this extraordinary film that he's been producing with Julian Temple as a director and other colleagues and his company. Roger is an extremely well known filmmaker who has always taken the most difficult sides of society. Face on dealing with crime, dealing with young people on the streets and more recently dealing with issues of justice and, of course, cities. My role is really to just tell you what's happening because Roger will then chair, later on, after the screening of the film, a discussion with four, I think, extremely interesting colleagues. I'm going to leave it to him to introduce them when we come to that, after the screening. The film will last just about an hour, I think. Roger, is that right? And I think there will be a very, very good occasion to have the discussion and also for you to comment a bit later. I want to also just end this very brief introduction by asking Nadsa testify to turn it on. But since Nadsa, who is standing over there, is leaving us tomorrow, I just wanted to use this opportunity to thank her for organizing this and many other things with us. So, Natsa, thank you. You are about to witness the very exciting story of a city and its people. It will be an adventure that will open new sites in familiar surroundings. That city is Detroit, home of nearly 2 million people. Back in 1701, long before this land became a nation, Cadillac planted the colors of France on Detroit's shore. And thus began a rich and inspiring history which has brought Detroit to its finest hour, the today of which we are a part. I am honored to be serving as mayor at this most eventful and productive period in Detroit's history. And I'm honored to be a participant in the Detroit story. Detroit's the city of champions. The whole world knows that Detroit is the American city whose products have revolutionized our way of living. Today we're going to show you the Detroit you've never met. And I'll take you guys for a tour around some of Detroit's best ruins. Stuff you won't see anywhere else in the world, only in Detroit. Rome's got ruins. Athens got ruins. Ours are bigger. Look on my works, ye mighty and despair. The Packer plant was the biggest building in the world at the time it was built. It's roughly 3 million square feet right now. It is the largest abandonment in the North American continent. You can ride around Detroit for hours and just see scenes of devastation. It's just like there was a war and they didn't do any rebuilding. They didn't clean out the carnage. Oh, it's a mess, man. Welcome to motherfu Detroit. God damn, Wonder Woman. It's a slow motion Katrina. You look at the World Trade Center. A couple planes crashing in. All the sympathy, the outpouring, the federal dollars they pour in. They got 3,000 people here. We probably had in the last 30 years of the crime and everything probably had 20,000 people killed. We've had thousands of houses destroyed, thousands of businesses destroyed. Where's our sympathy? We got the dance, motherfuckers. No wonder everybody leaves. Detroit is a place that was built for more than twice as many people as now live there. It was built for 2 million people. Now there's maybe 800,000 people. Coming from the 60s to today. They would say, first of all, this is a ghost town. There is no rush hour anymore. There's not enough people on the road. First impressions would be, what happens? How could this happen? Why did this happen? How can we fix it? Say sustainable mercy. Say it's a state of emergency. There's so much of it, so many that looked like a war zone. It would seem as though at some point there was a mass exodus, as if a phone call was made, a warning was thrown out, and everyone left what they were doing that moment and walked away for good. Not since the last days of the Maya have the Americas witnessed a transformation as traumatic as that which has befallen the Motor City. Here, time seems to be running backwards. What was once the frontier city of the American dream, the Paris of the Midwest, is now in its strange beauty, the first post American city. It's a darkly cautionary tale for the entire industrialized world. Arriving at destination. But as you listen to the buzz of cicadas amongst the wildflowers and prairie that have reclaimed one third of the city, it is possible to feel you've traveled a thousand years into the future. And that amongst the ruins of Detroit lies a first pioneer's map to the post industrial future which awaits us all. What's the best city in the world? Generosity. Detroit's a city of islands. If you know where the islands are, you're the safest, friendliest place in the world. If you don't take your chances, the crime rate, yeah, it's high, but you know it's only high when it happens to you. A hundred years ago, the birth of the automobile in Detroit heralded a second American revolution, unleashing forces of mass production and consumerism, which shaped the 20th century and powered the wheels of American success. Dakar went on to revolutionize the geography not just of Detroit, but cities around the world, transform the way we imagine ourselves and jumpstart the American dream. Early on in the history of the United States, the ability to move on meant the chance to move up. And the automobile took over that meaning in the 20th century. What a dreamy rain. Detroit fell in love with the wealth produced by this single industry, a seemingly inexhaustible golden goose which determined the Motor City's explosive growth. And so the destinies of Detroit and the car were fatally entwined. Together they set off on the highway of the future and drove to the end of the. Early one morning. A man named Henry Ford, who had been building a horseless carriage in a shed back of his home, right where the Michigan Theater now stands, started it up. The echoes of that two cylinder motor have never died and they never will. The Michigan Theater to me is like the classic story of it all. I mean, that's where Henry Ford built his first car. And his wealth creates this building with this magnificent theater. And then the theater dies. Why? No parking. And then the building's gonna die. So what do they do? They gut the theater, make a parking lot out of it, save the building. And you know, that's Henry Ford's legacy, right? In a nutshell in one building. Ford was a very creative, very inventive man. And I think we have to realize that he helped create the consumer society. Now Mr. Ford, he's a millionaire. These are the stairs where Henry Ford would have been coming in and going out of the office every day here in Highland Park. So this right here is the world's first automated assembly line. Built in 1913. The assembly line is the key to mass production. Here workers joined the thousands of big and small parts to make the whole. One man, one function. The fundamental principle of mass production. Build a product faster with specialized tools and teams of unskilled workers. And you build it at less cost. See, my people is my theory of what this country is moving toward. Every worker a cog in motion. Well, that's the notion of Henry Ford. Hallelujah. Praise the maker of the Model King. Speed up the belt. Speed up the belt. This is a factor that changed the world. The birth of the modern arguably takes place here today. The building has been less than kept up. Everything is all bad. That's all I can. When Ford introduced the first assembly lines, he found that many workers would not or could not produce as fast as he wanted them to produce. Some people would just come and look at the job and turn around and walk out. I worked in a factory once, you know, you do the same thing over and over again every day. It's like doing time. I did that too. My first job was at Ford Motor Company working on the line. I felt like a robot. There was no thinking that went into it. And I just knew that I wanted more. The Model T plant was outside Detroit. And in 1918, Henry Ford set up Highland park as a separate city, the first of many autonomous suburbs. And we had started drinking beer and gin. The big three did in fact rule Detroit. A lot of what you see around you is a result of their economic decisions, if you will. By redrawing the map of the rapidly expanding city, the auto barons were able to siphon the wealth out of Detroit and pay taxes into the coffers of their own private fiefdoms. This wasn't thinking in human terms. It wasn't thinking in terms of what's good for the general population. It was only thinking in terms of what's good for the stockholders. And of course, that's the story of Detroit now. A lot of people leaving, they're living out of town. I plan on leaving myself. Highland park had population of probably 55,000. At peak, it's probably around 12,000 now. This beautiful library, McGregor Library over here was donated by Ford money. It's shut down now, boarded up. I can see this was a very upscale neighborhood in its day. Now, I met a gal one night in Highland Park. These were like your top dollar residences. A lot of them were done in this sort of Moorish influence style. She's a picture of a queen. She's the gal I met one night in Highland Park. Highland park is bankrupt and they don't have the money even to tear them down. See, it's the state of emerg sustainable emergency. Was not a good man. In a sense, he was a horrible man. But he was a very intelligent man, so he paid decent wages. January 14, 1914. Ford increased the average worker's wage to $5, which was nearly doubling it. Overnight. 10,000 people showed up here in the winter on this street out here. And so many they finally brought the police. Fire hosed him. You know, it got out of control. We're in money. We're in money. We thought about what it takes to get along. Ford wasn't looking to make his workers into consumers. But unintentionally, that's what he did. He began to pay wages high enough that the average working man could buy a car. Well, it seems your contribution demands say that he's got a little out of hand. Well, Lord, Mr. Ford, what have you done? If you give up everything in terms of going and doing this eight hours a day, every day for 30 years, he'll give you a nice big car. It works for most of them. Some of us don't, don't want that. But most of them do. They love it. Ford recognized that unless you pay People money they couldn't consume. But in that sense, he's also responsible for a lot of the things that have happened to us as human beings, that we've become so consumerist and that we're devastating the planet. It was good money. People could come to Detroit. They could ascend to the middle class. I'm going to Detroit, Give myself a good dog. Well, there's a huge migration from the south because the plants had been opened up for blacks to work in them for the first time. My uncles and everything worked in Ford and Chrysler. That's how we got to come to Detroit from Alabama. They came and got the jobs, and they sent for all the relatives. We lived in one house with maybe three bedrooms with four families. And my husband was born in a little town called Marion Junction in Alabama, where there were probably more cows and people and practically the whole town moved up here. From the beginning, the automakers imported the prejudices of the south into Detroit, dividing everything along racial lines. A policy of virtual apartheid that would eventually tear apart the very fabric of the city. Henry Ford was a guy who had the black workers there, and he created a little town for them to live in called Inkster. And then he had the town for the white workers live in called Dearborn. But Dearborn was a very unique city, Very racial city. Whites only. The black person or family moved in. They were absolutely trashed. Their house was trashed, windows were broken. They didn't last a week, so they never came. In 1925, 20,000 Klan members celebrated their race hatred on the steps of Detroit City Hall. There's nothing more important to white people than Detroit than staying away from niggers. They don't like them. Never did. Never will. Mother. So that building's strange, too, to see it kind of like looks like it's gutted. That was an upscale hotel. The Lee Plaza was a hotel for black entertainers, musicians. They could not stay downtown. It was segregated. This is where blacks stayed. It was a pretty opulent hotel back in the day, but since the 70s, I think it's been abandoned. It's hard to imagine now, but musicians like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong used to play here. Four years ago, the roof was entirely made of copper. And the scrappers went in, they set it on fire, and then they would loosen up the copper and knock it off the roof and let it fall into the street, street below. But I talked to the cops that were standing around, and they said they didn't have the power to do anything about it. A lot of people just do this because they're laid off work. If you can make two to five hundred dollars a day, why not. Only clothes in only fans. The magic spell you care. This is lovely. And road. So what are they doing on the top floor do you think? The sounds of it looks like they're about to bring down some pipes and probably cut 20 foot sections of steel pipe up there and they're probably, they're going to drop them down the old elevator shaft or try to bring them down the stairwell but they, they tend to like to drop them down the elevator. It's a lot easier but that sounds good. Yeah. Sounds like the world's ending. 24's up. The mid-20s saw a clash of automotive giants pitting GM's new ideas of style against Ford's tried and tested notions of no frills unless utility. The outcome of this epic battle would determine the course of the American dream and go on to transform the geography of America's cities. Design fueled GM's success allowing it to overtake Ford and dominate the market. Its must have range of latest models drove the explosive consumer boom of the late 20s. All the way down the boulevard there, that's the old GM headquarters. Those four big tall buildings. That was where they were headquartered when some president said as GM goes, so goes the world. So let's hope that's not true today. So what do you do with a huge building like that? It's empty now, you know. In 1920s Detroit was fabulously wealthy. Not only for the auto wealth but 75% of the illegal liquor was was coming from Canada through Detroit. So we had it all back then. This area here is called the new center. And in the 1920s when downtown was just exploding and the skyscrapers going up, they were so crowded they started a new center down here. And so they built the Fisher Building. The GM Building. Fisher Building was going to be four towers like that one right there. But then 1929 came and that was the end of that. The depression dealt the auto industry a devastating blow with production dropping from 5.6 million cars and trucks in 1929 to 1.4 million in 1932. Overnight, Detroit's economy collapsed. I don't think the city ever recovered from the massive upheaval from 1910 to 1930, that doubling of the population, it was explosive. And then it just as quickly as it went up balloon decompressed. In Detroit, the recession lingered on through the 19th century 30s plunging auto workers below the poverty line. My children eat three square meals a day with the despair of joblessness came the determination to organize. Their struggle for union representation and a living wage drew them into inevitable conflict with the Big Three. The major start for the the UAW was the sit down strike at the GM plant in Flint. The workers took over the plant and locked themselves in. These people had families, you know, they wanted to feed them, they wanted to give them a decent living wage. And so Detroit rallied around that and became sort of a union town. GM and Chrysler were kind of hand in glove. One did, and within 24 hours the next one recognized the UAW. United Action brings victory. The people have won again. Henry Ford was not happy. Henry Ford did not want the unions and fought vigorously to oppose it. There was a large incident where the unions ran into Henry Ford's goon squad on the Rouge overpass. They opened fire with machine guns on the crowd. It took the outbreak of war to rescue Detroit from depression. As American troops went into battle overseas, Henry Ford finally recognized the uaw. This is Detroit, Michigan, in case you don't know. They call it the automobile center of the world. Five million of them last year makes a lot of noise, but not so much noise that we didn't hear those bombs when they fell on Pearl Harbor. So we stopped the line, Literally stopped producing cars and trucks and started producing items for the war effort. During World War II, Detroit was the center of all manufacturing. This was the arsenal of democracy, as they called it. Hundreds of thousands of people flooded into the city to work here. You can catch that Detroit special. You can ride most anywhere. And the housing was very short. Many of the places people would have to sleep shifts. One bed would be used by three people. Morning shift, the afternoon shift or the midnight shift. This second massive wave of migration from the south created a pressure cooker situation in the city, causing the racial fault line on which Detroit was built to split asunder. People came up from down South. They're slower, it was hotter and they weren't used to our ways. Not only had black workers come from the south, but white workers had come from the south and they refused to use the same toilet. They threatened to strike. And so it had a whole new situation developing. You would think people would be living together more and not have a riot. When everybody's got one thing, that's defeat Nazism. But apparently they had a race riot. They were fighting one that was a real race riot. I had never lived in a city where racial tensions were so sharp. I remember this area which is called Black Bottom, not too far from here, Old Paradise Valley. And it was the black entertainment and business district. I went to school in Black Bottom. I loved my teachers. I loved them. Ms. Emily Wagstaff chose me out of the rest of the girls. And she taught me a song I'll never forget. This is my country Braves there a man with souls so dead who never to himself has said this is my home, my native land this is my native land this is my country Land of my birth and before then, I didn't know I had a country. I was from the South. I never even felt like I belonged in the United States. Hastings Street Opera. I think we're on Hastings street here. I believe boys all down Hastings Street. It used to be a very lively street. Boom, boom, boom, boom I'm gonna shoot you right down, right off of your feet Take you home with me. There's a lot of bars. There were hookers, of course, and there was all that nightlife, but it was community. I didn't go to their clubs, but I went to other clubs. I went dancing with my husband. And we would meet under the Kern's clock. Women were dressed, men were dressed. The bars, restaurants, the book Cadillac Hotel was visitors from all over. It was a different city then. Bustling and places you went. You never worried about crime. Okay. You know, being mugged or personage. They painted Woodward Avenue gold. This street for the 50th anniversary of the automobile. Here in Detroit in the 40s, there's a city that's famous for making cars with windows. The cars were the star. It was the boom time for American cars. That's when cars got bigger and bigger and flashier and flashier. And certainly the city of Detroit was phenomenally wealthy during that period. This was cars the jewel of the Midwest. And it was a beautiful. It was a jewel city, really. The future looked good. GM entered its high rococo period of design under the guidance of GM's head stylist, the extravagant Harley Earl. Harley Earl designed this car that we're sitting in. He initially worked in Hollywood building cars for the movies and for the movie stars. He looked at cars not as transportation but as entertainment. He made the General Motors cars that kept the same basic standardized parts from year to year to year, but he made them look different. This is the Fisher Building where they built the bodies that Harley Earl designed. Town, we're gonna sneak around. This is one way. Don't tell anybody. It's very interesting. Go in there. There's all these stalactites from the drippings going on in it. We're gonna take a tour of the old Fisher body. 21 room. The whole building was production for Cadillac assembly line. I was raised with a rifle and mask, steadily beating my psychiatrist ass. Had a bunch of chemicals in here that they had to remove to get this building up to safe standard. Still not environmentally sound. Had a collapse right here. Since the last time I've been in, what's good for GM became what's good for America. Increasingly the rhythm of American life was set by the cycle of of artificial obsolescence engineered in Detroit, which would transport America to a new consumer utopia where a buyer's dreams could be turned into cash. This town is an all right town for an uptight town like this town. For a long time Detroit ruled. But it had already started its decline. Right after the second World War. Really everything was based around cars and the success of failure of cars. Detroit had become a one trick pony. After the war, Detroit became the fourth largest city in the United States. But even as the population reached its peak and these endless golden chariots kept rolling off the line, the seeds of the Motor City's demise had already been sown. So I look back, I see my city under construction. I look back, I see my city under construction with the locusts surrounding, suffocating our city and trying to show gun ravaging the crops, making the situation hopeless. But we staying focused. Never let the locust approach us. Are you from Detroit? Yeah, born and raised. What's going on here? I have no idea. I just woke up. So where we're going, we have to crawl through a hole over here. There's no other way to really get over there. So the Packer plant, it used be to to be manufacturer of the finest luxury automobiles in Detroit. A year ago this was an intact section of the Packard. And now you can barely walk through it. It's too dangerous. Some of these pillars have been scrapped by the numerous gangs of scrap thieves that come through here. And they've already started to cut at this pillar. They've cut through it here and they've cut through it here. That means they're planning on taking it. They haven't knocked it out yet. You could probably give this a good, good whack with a sledgehammer and this thing would collapse. So this is a really, really weak section of the building. That would not be a good idea to hang out here very long. These large metal things used to be air conditioners. A couple years ago I was in here. I found a man sleeping in one of them. He'd made his home inside of it. There's a real realization to me that there are people living amongst the ruins in Detroit. Post war period saw Detroit pioneer the great American an escape from the cities to suburbia. But to get there, Detroiters needed cars and roads to drive them on. The construction and auto lobbies made sure they got them. The creation of the freeway system right into the center of the city ripped apart neighborhoods like Black Bottom, Paradise Valley was literally ripped out to make the Chrysler Freeway. When you rip that apart and just shred it, then people are completely dislocated, both emotionally and physically. Was there pressure by the auto industry to create the freeways? I think there was. General Motors played a large part in the dismantling of the street railway system. This is the Davison Freeway. This was actually the first freeway built in America. In my day, this would have been all jammed here with traffic. So that was one of the reasons I said, I'm not going to go live in Detroit anymore and make this drive and all this traffic. White people started to move to the suburbs. We have almost 40 suburbs, I think, of Detroit. You had the withdrawal of all the tax base from the city, what they used to call white flight. These guys went and fought in the war and then they came home and they thought they should have a nice little house in a safe neighborhood and good schools and shopping nearby. And they created these artificial communities. It was all built on bribing local zoning boards. This town and the people that ruled this town made sure that everybody had to own a car if they wanted to get anywhere. If you're in the suburbs, they've set it up so you have to have a car. They create the illusion that you want to have one. The fact is, you have to have one. The only way, literally you can get in and out the of of them is by a car. You'd starve to death if you didn't have. You'd be like a quadriplegic in some ways, because the only way you can get out to a food store is by car. Northland was the first shopping mall in the whole United States, and it's up on 8 mile. And you stayed out there, shopped North Lane. Didn't come down to Detroit too much except Christmas time. But that was the decline really of downtown, because people then moved to the suburbs and moved out of Detroit. Commuters began to lose touch with the nightmarish reality of the decaying inner city they had left behind. When I went to work back and forth, I could watch the houses like that house, and over a period of six years, you could start to see a Decline. One time I came back from the lake and I decided rather than take the expressway, I would take Woodward. And I was sad because Woodward wasn't Woodward downtown. It was terrible. Boarded up buildings and whatever the neighborhood began to seem like. It was just started to go down. People lost hope in the community. Car industry, though, was doing booming times. This is exactly the period of the ascendancy of Motown Records. Which put Detroit on the map internationally in a way that nothing else ever had. Barry Gordy had his ideas about producing records from working on the Ford assembly line. This guy will write the song, this guy will sing, these girls will sing behind them. He thought this would be a way to produce the music that would be efficient. It worked like an assembly line. Because he had so many artists, he had to keep the studio going. The first group I ever sang in, I was the only white guy in the group. There didn't seem to be racist tendencies towards me from our black audiences. Most of the trouble we ran into was from the white people. I mean, it was always very tense, the racial situation. The police were like a white occupying army in the ghetto by African Americans. Every one of them had been, like, shaken down and humiliated by the police at one time or another. There was just this incredible anger and resentment that built up. You couldn't stand on the street corner and sing anymore. The police would ride by and unmarked cars and they get out and they arrest you or beat you in the head with a club or just abuse you. Just tell you to get away. You can't stand here and saying you can't gather two or three other corners. It was like martial rule. Detroit was becoming half and half black and white with the migration of whites to the suburbs. But everything was still run by whites. It was very clear that the tensions that were developing between. Between the young folks and the police were going to explode. There was like a tinderbox. It's in the air. I mean, that kind of feeling that we can't take it any longer. You knew it was gonna happen. You just didn't know exactly when. And it was overdue. And then, boom, the riots. Take out the dance, motherfuck. We're coming up to the corner of 12th and Clermont. The riots that took place, you know, right in here. And then all up and down this street was 12th Street. This is where it took place, right here. The police brutality got out of hand. We were at the Fox Theater performing. And somebody beckoned me to the edge of the stage and said, martha, come here, come here. I thought my dress was Unzipped or something. They said, you've got to tell everybody there's a ride going on. They better go home. I was driving my car down the freeway and I was diverted by the military. There were tanks on the freeway heading downtown. The National Guard was out full force. 67 was not a race riot. 67 was a righteous uprising against police brutality. This is a rebellion. This is not just looting and this is not a criminal element. It was a rebellion. And it started all over the United States. It was time for equality. It's a simple statement that black folks are tired of being misused and mistreated. Oppressed for over 400 years. And for seven days there was violence in the street. 43 people killed. When the riots took place here, I was 12. I saw buildings on fire. And what I thought as a kid, I thought that this world was coming to an end. I thought it was over. I saw the National Guards come down this street here, riding in those jeeps. And on the back of those jeeps they had these guns. It was a walk. Johnny can do it. They decided to bring in the federal troops because it would stop it no matter what. And that pretty well put an end to it. The jubilation in the city was fabulous. We had scared the hell out of them when the riots absolutely shook my parents to the core of their beings. My father was traveling at the time. My mother was home with the children with us and you know, the gunfire, the National Guard. But my father was resolved to stay in the city another year. For me and you, it's expediated. The city turning black. Whites fled, okay? They went to the suburbs. The white people just wrote off each other. They just solidified their plans. To completely abandon. Here is something that will live with me for a lifetime. I'll never forget that. We never recovered. Never recovered. By 1973, we were the only white children in our neighborhood and in our school. Here's the school here. You can see it's abandoned. Well, being being the only white children in a school that is all black is tough. You get bullied, you get jeered at, you get shoved, you get made fun of. And I can relate to what it is to be a minority at school. We then moved to Royal Oak where there was no black children in our school at all. There was a racial divide occurring almost simultaneously. While people were moving out, There was an 8 mile demarcation point almost like a great wall of China. And it separated literally the suburbs from the city. And the white people in the suburbs of Detroit, of which There are about three and a half million compared to, say, 800,000 now in the city. They don't know anything about the city of Detroit. They only go there to go to a football game, a baseball game or a concert. If I had to try to simply. The difference between the city of Detroit versus the suburbs, it is as clearly different as black and white. This neighborhood here is perfectly safe. Police patrol. Grass is cut, there's flowers planted. The street is clean. When you cross the Eight Mile Road bridge, you come into another world altogether. This is my story and can't nobody tell it for me. Do it well, inform me. I'm well aware that I don't belong here. You made that perfectly clear. On this side of Eight Mile Road, you have a neighborhood where most of the houses are gone. The houses aren't even physically here anymore. But you'll see there's already a lot of houses that people have just walked away from. Burned out structures, garbage in the streets. And then we have the highest murder rate in the nation. This is one of the worst neighborhoods in Detroit, crime wise, despite being 2,000ft from the suburbs. The Smith's house, where we spent a lot of time as children, is there, but it's been burned out. It's just an abandoned house now. So journey with me as I take you through a sniffy little place that I once used to call home sweet home. Mr. Smith worked at Ford Motor Company as well. They lived in here. No, this was the. This was the lounge room. This was the living room. This was the dining room. We had many meals here. The kitchen here. You can see there's been a fire here, unfortunately. There was a pantry in the back there. There's something terribly sad about coming here. Hard to believe. Hard to believe. They had stayed much later than most of us. And then one of the daughters had gotten knocked down and her bag stolen just half a block from here. And that's when they left, moved to Royal Oak. Welcome to my nightmare. In the early 70s, it was a mess. You had the first, what they called oil crisis. Remember that? Where this whole thing they're involved in now really came to the surface about 73. Gas prices go up overnight. And all of a sudden Americans are desperate for small, fuel efficient cars. Foreign cars started pounding the Detroit manufacturers because they wouldn't make the little cars because you didn't make as much money per unit on them. They took their eye off the ball. They ignored the competition from Asia and Europe. And then all of a sudden the plants were closing down. The Fisher body, the Cadillac plant was being closed down. The momentum was no longer there. It did seem like at that time, well, we're done. We're not going to go anywhere. I think someplace shady here. Detroit became kind of an experiment in post industrial life. What would happen if you took these people and then you took all the jobs then in the 80s, what would happen if they gave them some really cheap cocaine that you could smoke? A nightmare. Yeah, exactly. In my neighborhood, it was a middle working class neighborhood. There was houses everywhere, there was kids playing everywhere, there was trees everywhere. It was a beautiful thing. And when crack cocaine hit the inner cities, it destroyed everything. The children started to see things and see people making money, selling drugs and, and that's what it they, what they wanted to do because it was no other means of them getting a job. Just like now growing up as a kid, I saw guys that stood around and told women what do to. That brought them lots of money. So I thought, if they can do this, my father going to work for eight hours and my mother going to work for eight hours. These guys got bags full of money. Which way do I want to go? I mean, I've been shot, I've did some shooting. That's just the reality of it. And I believe that the real war is not someplace else, but it's here. What the hell is democracy if you can't get it to work here? How are you gonna go someplace else and set up some type of democracy when it's not working here? Now you got kids raising kids or raising themselves. So what else are we gonna do? Well, let's go bust out a window. They're closing down a lot of the schools here. That's unheard of. Where are the kids to go to school at? There's no jobs for these people to get when they get out of the school. There's really no point in the school being here or training these people if there's nothing for them to do once they get out. It's a really favorite spot of the local graffiti scene. These are broaching machines they use in the auto industry and die casting and they teach people how to run machines for the auto factories. And this was one of the main vocational schools. They taught people to do this and, you know, in Detroit we used to make things, but today, not anymore. What is that? It is American government. Kids don't know what love is nowadays. They're a little angry and mean to themselves. And music could have soothed their souls. Heartbreaking. Same schools this way. Schools aren't supposed to look like us. Schools out for it. They took arts out of schools. They started taking. The playgrounds was destroyed. They took music out of schools. So you got all these kids with idle time. And we all know when you got idle time, it's time for the devil to play. It's devil's name. It's Devil's night. It's Devil's night. Cause I came back to rule this time It's Devil's night. Cause I came back to take what you. Devil's night. I burnt down the house before. And I did it just because it was fun. You know, I thought destroying, oh, let's see if we can get away before the police come. Let's throw a rock at the police and get them to chase us. And that was our fun. In 1986, I remember standing on the porch of that house with all the dots on it, and I had an epiphany. Fireworks went off in my head and I was able to see the street become a work of art. And one of the houses here spoke to me. What's up, Doc? I heard it and I went out and I made a dot on it. And that dot grew and it kept growing and I kept listening, I kept hearing. And the cops came to talk with me and wanted to know whether or not I was crazy. I would have to say that I am crazy somewhat. Taking that that was chaotic and making it into something very positive. The oil prices went back down in the late 80s and the early 90s. And Americans, doing what Americans do, will typically buy the biggest vehicle they can afford to put fuel in. I'm driving in my car now. I got you on my wheel. All the big three bail themselves out with a car that's going to make more trouble than it's worth. I'm talking about the big gas guzzling SUVs. We're a big country. We're open country, we're spacious. We, you know, we like big. It doesn't cost really that much more to engineer and design a big car than a small car. But you can charge much more for a big car. When they're making those SUVs. They made $10,000 profit per unit. Per unit. In some ways it was good. It was a very profitable time for carmakers, suppliers. But it probably delayed the US car makers facing some of these underlying issues. The money that was there enabled them to escape. Escape the restructuring that inevitably had to be done. It was kind of perfect storm. A year ago, we had a major gasoline spike in price, which really decimated Detroit's Large SUV market completely, which was their last bastion of profitability. That was shortly followed by the housing lending crisis in the United States and the global economic Maldives. And it was a triple whammy that Detroit just could not pull out of the tailspin. This time around, when things are going really good and you got a golden goose and it's laying golden eggs all the time, you just think, this is the way it is forever. And nobody had the foresight to say, you know, what if, what if, what if? When you've done something that's been, you know, really successful for 50 or 75 years, it can be hard to change the way you do things. They thought the golden goose would never, ever die. The combination of sales dropping by about a third and an inability to get credit really precipitated the crisis that ended up with GM and Chrysler going to the government for loans and ultimately precipitated the bankruptcy restructuring of both companies. Everybody knew the alternative was that the company would say simply fail and liquidate. And it probably would have cost about 3 million jobs. It would have shut down most auto production in the US If GM stopped building cars, stopped paying its suppliers, they estimated the ripple effect would have been catastrophic. The amount of production in Detroit has gone down. It's been, you know, the city and some of the suburbs have been very hard hit. We worry about that. But in the end, you know, we've got a plan in place and the funding in place to really make GM healthy again. And that has to be the first priority. They don't give a shit about humans and human life. If it wasn't no jobs, you could always go get a job at like McDonald's or something, something little like that. But now you can't even, can't even do that. People was forced to do illegal stuff, you know, just to eat and survive. People are just improvising to make a living and doing whatever it takes by any means necessary. A lot of robbing, killing. Some of the sections of this floor they use for dog fighting. A couple times I've come in here, I found bloody tarps. Evidence of real recent pit bull fighting. The drug trade and dog fighting along with scrapping. That's probably about the three main things that people tend to do here when they've run out of other options for, for making income. If the US wants to be a part of this future of the automobile, then, you know, it's going to take a US based company. And I think we feel like GM is going to play a very important role in that. The Auto industry has come to the end of the line. I love to drive. I'm not saying I know I'm downgrade driving and automobiles, but to think that they are the answer to civilization and the evolution of humanity is childish. To get so excited about a few decades of mass production and to believe that that's heaven, I mean, it's crazy. The Packer plant has been designated as a hazardous waste site. But there's plenty of plants and life flourishing here. So even in the worst environments, we still get life taking hold. You know, anytime you get flowers and ruins together, it's moving. It tells its own story. Our grip on this planet is very tender. It doesn't take very long for nature to re establish its hold. And for me to come back to that neighborhood and actually see that there's nothing there, it hurts me, you know, in my heart. You have drug dealers who squatting into houses selling drugs at night. You never know what's going to happen or, or who's gonna pop out of somewhere like a devil coming out of a jack in the box or something. I was one of the guys up in those abandoned houses selling drugs or tearing up the house, you know, for nothing. You got so many people out here grabbing little girls, taking them in abandoned houses, raping them. I got three daughters and I have my sons that walk from school because I'm scared that somebody might grab them and take them up in the abandoned house. Now to be an adult and look back at all this like, wow, I just tore up my whole neighborhood for nothing. Our city, it is in total disarray. But the reason it's in disarray, and understand this, that abnormal behavior in an abnormal environment is a normal response. I've been to prison six times and I never stayed. I never had no job. I never had nothing to keep me focused until Goodwill came in and had really gave me a job. I wasn't doing nothing dirty, but I was so broke, I was about to do some dirt. We go in and we salvage the best part of the house. We tearing the house down, but we doing it where we can recycle it and sell it and make it a better place. This is our opportunity. Every man in here, this is our opportunity to give back. We lift each other up. It's good to get paid for it, but at the same time, we doing what we doing because we want to show everybody you can come out of prison and be somebody out here. At least 50,000 houses have been bulldozed. When the lots became vacant, many older African Americans were been raised in the south and who had grown their own food, decided to plant community gardens, not just for the food, but because they recognized that food is the way that you begin to care for yourself and think about yourself in a very different way. They're even talking about eliminating so many buildings and actually started putting up farming. Which makes it even more bizarre for me to see places here that might be farm where they were thriving establishments. The fastest growing movement in the United States today is the urban agricultural movement. And what's been so exciting is the number of young people who come to Detroit because they feel that we are pioneers for the 21st century. That's the amazing thing to me about Detroit is that it brings people who are like risk takers out to implement things that they believe in. You come here for a couple days and you're like, wait a second, this place is amazing. And on paper it's the worst place on earth, you know, and it's the last place you ever want to go to. I look around Detroit and I see the watermark. What happened to Detroit is basically an economic Katrina. It was a man made disaster, not a natural disaster. I suddenly realized that we were willing to let a major American city just fall off the face of the earth. And I thought, I want to go into the belly of the beast and see if I can figure out what's going on and how do we make things better. Fortunately, our city government isn't very active or actively keeping track of what's going on, you know, so a lot of us are growing our own food. I want to test out that theory that you can make a decent living on an acre of land. And right now it's bringing in about $500 a week, which is about what I make at Chrysler in a five day week with all the satisfaction that I get right now. My people come from down south and we have 40 acres still down there that we used to farm and grow on. So it's not really anything new to me. Actually, it's better now than when I thought I was really doing good. How could I live like this? How could I not live like this? This developing cottage industry is pretty much going to be Detroit's economy in 10 years instead of regular industry. I don't think it's going to be that long. Yeah, I really don't. The all American dream is dead. We're in the process of creating a new American dream. It's happening here, it's happening in the Detroit city of hope. I'm part of that hope. It's not a black thing, it's not a white thing. Economics play a part in a lot of this craziness that exists. But I think that people are coming around now and they are starting to understand that it's not about just I, it's about all of us. And those of you who are in your office buildings driving your Bentleys and your Jaguars, making judgments on us are somewhat a part of it really. You survive in the end what's at the end of the rainbow. Hopefully a pot of gold, but likely not this time. You can look at Detroit and see nothing but disaster, devastation, depopulation, disinvestment. Or you can look at Detroit and say, that's the future. Our plans are only paper plans. We either don't intend or are not able to do what we have said we will do. People of the nation and the world, you owe your continued support of Detroit. I solemnly assure you that we will not fail you in any way. Thank you very much. Not worth a million in prizes, Right? Thank you very much for coming and your very warm response to the film. The credits. Unfortunately my dear friend Natso cut off just at the last minute, but as you all know, I hope anyway, it was directed by Julian Temple. The producer is Georgina Henkin and I was the executive producer. And Georgina, I hope is going to be here to answer questions from the Detroit filming. Before we start and I introduce the panel, one thing I should tell you is that we filmed that in 10 days and it is by no means the whole story of what's going on in Detroit, but it's a way of getting your attention and I think in respect of the Phoenix Cities issues and the brilliant book which I commend to you, if you don't have it, you shouldn't be allowed to leave without buying a copy. It does raise questions that I hope will have relevance to Britain and British cities, European cities of course, that are going through this experience. And the question which I'm about to pose to everyone is what lessons are there from Detroit that we can use and what lessons can Detroit use from the Phoenix City work that you're all doing? It's a very interesting question. As opposed to what we think, who made the film, in a sense a question about a post industrial future. And in that sense it's relevant far beyond the shores of one huge company town, as was. There's Georgina, who's just arrived, who was the producer of the film. Well done. Thanks, George. Anyway, we have a terrific panel. We have Zenith Andrews, who is the principal of St. Catherine's School, Catherine Fergus Academy. Sorry, I got that wrong. I got your name right, but I got the school wrong. Where we would have filmed if we'd had even one more day in Detroit, sadly. And I want to hear from more about the urban farming experience. I hope some of you heard her on the Today program this morning. She's excellent. And I'm so thrilled you came all this distance. Richard Sennett, who you, many of you will know is here, of course, very distinguished sociologist. His book the Uses of Disorder that I read years ago and was very influenced by, and I'm delighted to say he's a very close friend. Now, Stuart Gulliver, who's been working on the redevelopment and rescue, you know, rescue perhaps a too strong word, but anyway, Glasgow and many other parts of European cities. And Bruce Katz, who is from the Brookings foundation and has written a brilliant article and done a lot of work. Brilliant article about Detroit in particular, which deals with the question of how we can go forward with a city that has lost its original purpose. So we're going to talk. Each person's going to talk for five, six, seven minutes. And then I very much hope we can include because we want to do some work here. I hope you like the film. This isn't meant to be a film discussion. This is a city's discussion. And where do we go from here? So, Asina, tell us about the urban farming movement, because one of the reasons it's not more of it in the film is that when you hear about it secondhand, it seems rather airy fairy as an idea. I'm not quite sure what airy fairy means. Well, it's not real. It doesn't sound fairy. So I didn't know if that had some kind of, like, gay connotation. No, no, no, no. But. Sorry, sorry. I really. I really knew cultural difference. I've lived in this country, too. No, no, no. I'm sorry. That was kind of disingenuous. I knew it. There is a really vibrant. Sometimes I'm a little put off with how almost militant some of the urban farm people are. Our school started. We started having a garden about 24 years ago because my grandparents came from the south. They had a farm in Detroit on 8 mile, which you saw. But I. Okay. It was on 8 mile, and you can say there's more to it. Oh, okay. There's. That's not 8 mile that I know. But in the 20s, when my grandparents came, all of 8 mile was farms. And where my school is now, which is probably a Mile from the Detroit River. Those were all farms also. So when we say it has left its original purpose, I'm not sure it's left its original purpose. It's just at that purpose of the. The auto industry, which was a wonderful time, I think that it changed. It clearly changed my life. It's why I'm who I am, because my parents both work there, but they're very. There's a. There's just this wide range of people who are involved in the urban gardening program, urban farming. And some of them have found these little niche markets where they just grow one little thing and make enough money to live on. Some of them have plans for big gardens, big farms. There is a D Town farm that is, I think, around 12, 13 acres, and it supports several families as they work on this farm. There is an organic farm that. Just two acres, and they earn $50,000 a year off this two acres of land we've had. Where do they sell it? They sell to restaurants. They sell in the summers. They sell at the farmers market. They have developed their own kind of distribution site. This summer, I got lots of email from people who thought we should maybe start wineries because there is a microclimate, and vineyards need a microclimate in. Because in the river and some of the things in Detroit, there are microclimates. There's a microclimate. It's just. I work in a high school, so can you just see me making wine? My job is on the line half the time already, so I'm not sure I want to start the wine production. Captain Ferguson Academy, get high with us. You know, I'm not thinking that will work very well, but recently the Kresge foundation in New York sent a MacArthur fellow to Detroit to talk about what was going on in urban farming and some of the possibilities. And I think that was the. And we hosted the meeting in our school. That was the first time I'd seen some of these farmers that I'd heard of. And I was really afraid they were going to hurt her because they. We've been doing this for such a while. Why now? Why now? Are you sending someone from outside to come in and say, oh, maybe we can make this work a little better for you. So it goes from couples to families to community organizations. And ours is just a school that really just started with a garden. And then the science teacher brought two rabbits. And then the rabbits had goats. And then the goats had a horse. The rabbits had goats. I think we need to look at the science of. There's a Strange science going on in my school. So then it became not just a garden, it became a farm. And I really believe that one of the ways that we are going to try to use it in the next few years up to this point, it was just. I wanted kids to know that you could grow food. And we started a project called the Portable Garden so you could get a tire and get some seeds from us and we would bring dirt to your house so you could just grow something. And then from there, we hope you start a bigger garden. My goal now, before I retire, unless our governor has this new thing, I may be retiring in a month, but if I don't have to retire in the next month, my goal is to see if we can't set kids up in farms in some of these neighborhoods that, that you saw where there's one house on the block and 10 blocks around them that's. That's empty. I don't think you need to get rid of the sidewalks in between them. I think you just grow on the land that's there. The. Our bee guy, the guy who takes. Who does our instruction in bees. And it really is incredible that these city kids, even some of the little cutie girls, you know, they bring clothes to go milk the goats in the morning and change back into their little cute clothes. But our bee guy and our kids get stung. I never hear anybody complaining, oh my God, I've been stung by a bee. But they just say, oh, you get stung sometime. And apparently at the turn of the century, at the beginning of school, people would take their kids to give bee stings. But there's a whole deal because they. It has something to do with your immune system, they think. So before you went to school with all those strangers, you get a bee sting. It was before, I guess, immunization rules, but so when there is so much good, positive reclamation, natural reclamation of the soil and kind of cleansing of the soil, that there is a big, huge bee business in Detroit and honey. So we. His company is called Wild Detroit Honey, but it's because it's from wildflowers that have taken over all these vacant lots. So when one of the positive things about urban farming is that there isn't a whole lot of work that has to be done to fix the soil and that that would be your biggest concern. But after seeing a few movies in the last, we're taking some kids to South Africa. So I've had to learn lots more about this farm thing than I wanted to. And so I've seen all these movies and after seeing Food Inc. Even if the soil is not that good, how much worse could it be than what we're eating now? So can I interrupt you. It's really useful this time, but I wanted, in order to lead into Bruce's question. No, I wanted to ask about what scale we're talking about. Are we talking about thousands? Are we talking about hundreds? We know there's 39 square miles out of 140 that seems to be going back available. So it's a series of small businesses. But how big is it, do you think? Is there any way of knowing at that meeting how many people turned out? The people at the meeting at my school, There are probably 50 people at the school. In the middle of the day, in the middle of the week. Not everybody is doing full time farming as there are very few farmers who do full time farming in most of the United States. But I say they represent 5, 600 people. Okay. And maybe a thousand acres. Right. Okay. That would be my. There is. Obviously it is the best. I mean, according to Grace and our research that it's the fastest growing movement in America, which is a very interesting idea. I'm stunned. I think that's why I'm here. Nobody cared. I had a garden 10 years ago. So I think it is a time. It is something whose time, its time has come partially because food is so important and there's so many issues around food right now and food security and food deserts and there are just a whole lot of issues that are. And do you get any state money, local money? Is there any subsidy at all for this or is it entirely. Yeah, well, I mean farming. No. My last audit, the auditor wanted to know. Now talk to me about this goat feed and sweet hay, but we also grow hay across town. So we, we grow our own. So self sufficient. More or less. Sorry. Yes. Okay. You're borrowing. Yes, yes. Too. Bruce, in terms of kind of your model of ways cities can revive themselves in mixtures of small business and so on. Can you talk about that? And the Detroit. Your piece on Detroit, which I don't know if you talk about or people have seen, but is very much. It draws on Turin and to see if you can build on what Asimath has been saying. So I don't know if folks in the audience know the scale up to train just the city. The city is 138 square miles. You can fit Manhattan in it, plus San Francisco, plus Boston, plus a whole bunch of this. This is just a vast landscape and I think that there is a movement not just in Detroit, but in Philadelphia and some other cities towards community gardens. I think that's one of the things that is going on. I don't think that's the exclusive future of Detroit. But I mean, and I, so I, you know, I think the piece that we wrote in the New Republic and the other work that we're doing, first of all, because you mentioned that this is not the whole story. There's a lot of things going on in Detroit. The entire riverfront has been reclaimed. The Detroit River. It's a phenomenal river. It's the biggest riverfront reclamation in the United States. I mean miles. Because the city had been abandoned. So there hadn't been a lot built along the river. And that was by a philanthropist, that was by the Kresge Foundation. You've got an enormous transit project going on from the downtown to Wayne State. There's still enormous cultural institutions, health care institutions. This is a city of 800,000 people. We're not talking about a small place, either in land size or in population. So the future of this place and its broader metropolis we think depends on some big challenges and issues that the country has to confront. We're coming out of this Great Recession with an understanding that there is no return to normal in the United States. Because what preceded this recession was anything but normal. We have basically had a run of excess and consumption and financial engineering that cannot be repeated. So the promise going forward for the American economy and for these cities is that they return to some kind of production. It's not a post industrial future. If the US cedes completely production and manufacturing and deployment of what we invent, I don't think that's a very good future for this country, for our country. I'm sorry, I'm in England right now. So I think the live conversation, I think the live conversation in the United States coming out of the recession is, is let's build a very different economy. And part of that is around exports because we're not a very export oriented economy. Part of it is around leading the transition to low carbon, not just cracking the code on clean energy, but being a producer in renewables, in sustainable infrastructure and sustainable products and energy efficient buildings in the 21st century metropolis. And so I think the kind of future that Detroit could have is a future. It's a very diverse future in port. It's going to return some of the urban landscape to its natural form. But, but we're also going to see other parts of the city return to productive capacity. Perhaps we're going to see Densification of pockets. It's such a big place that it's hard to imagine the kind of restoration and regeneration that you've had in Europe around some of the cores and so forth. But if the right policies are put in place over the course of the next 15 or 25, Stewart is the one who taught me think in 25 and 35 year cycles, because that's the kind of recovery we're talking about. Then we might over time, though, Detroit obviously is really one of the hardest cases in the country, return the U.S. economy and its major metropolitan areas to some kind of insane growth and development. So, you know, I love the film. I'm going to have to say this is the second time I saw it because I watched it over the weekend, actually made my kids watch it. And I think like most films about cities in the United States, it's criticism of the big policy stuff in our country stops in the 50s and the 60s. They built the interstate, they emptied the cities, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. My biggest criticism is over the past 20 years, we have no innovation policy in the United States. We have no energy policy in the United States, we have no manufacturing policy in the United States, we have no transportation policy in the United States. The promise of Obama is to change that. And we're slowly, gradually doing that. And if we can build that constituency and coalition to reshape some of the big driving public and private sector forces, then the future of Detroit will be quite different over the next 20 to 30 years. But we have to think at that scale. We can't think at the community garden scale. We have to think at the scale of reshaping an economy. And then we can have a real conversation about the future. Well, I think that's really interesting. The one element that you rely on, at least in the case you put in the article, and I'm very interested to hear you both, as it were, comment on, is a way in which local government has to change itself. They have to work, the suburbs have to work with the inner city. I mean, one of the strongest themes that comes out of the film, you can see, is this division between the suburbs and the inner city. But your thesis does depend on them working together. You call for it literally, specifically. And is that likely to happen? How does that happen in Detroit? I don't know. I mean, I don't know enough about the city to know more poor people live in the suburbs of the United States than live in cities. The stark divide between cities and suburbs is not what it was 30 or 40 years ago. Poverty has crossed city lines. Including in Detroit. Including in Detroit, absolutely. Okay. And what about this local government question? Is there a local government in sight that would be responding to Bruce's challenges? See, I think that the most interesting part of Bruce's discussion last night and then throughout today was this idea of metropolitan areas. In science, when I was a kid, they talk about the future, what was going to happen in the future. People would buy water. Who would believe that? And the other thing was that there were these mega, kind of mega places. And for us it was supposed to be Detroit and Chicago were one big place. So we didn't go all the way to Chicago. We just went to Oakland county, which is the county that has. That's the north of Detroit and has a number of suburbs that go from heaven. These little two room cracker box kind of houses, two McMansions I think they refer to in some of the literature. It is so antagonistic. And I don't know if it is a remnant of Coleman Young. Clearly that was part of it. He just put 8 mile on the. Like, don't come over here acting a fool and we won't come over there. And then on the other side of 8 mile there a was L. Brooks Patterson, who was the county. Colonel Young was the mayor. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Yeah. And came out of the uaw. So there. I think that if we can get government to start to look at it in a regional way and not competitive. And I don't see the guy from this school who just studies government. We talked about it last night. People who go into government have just a whole different kind of. So we got to make sure that the people who live there. Because I'm not. Yeah, but Obama excluded, of course, because that's my man. My mother has his picture in our house and we haven't had a picture of president in our house since Kennedy. So we. But I think that we have to start thinking collaboratively and that we all sink or swim and together. And right now, at least southeastern Michigan is not quite there. You think the recession would have knocked them in the head. But there are too many old ones that are still there from the previous era of you and me or you against me. So I would agree that if we could do that, if we could. See, I talk in extremes because I weren't in high school because I was about to say we just kill all of those people and then started fresh. But there has to be. Oh my God. Oh no. If we could just Talk those people into thinking differently about the issues. Right. Those are not the views of the Brookings. Right, I bet, I bet. Or Detroit Public school. I think you have to look at it in those ways, though, that if not, we're doomed. We are doomed. Okay. Now, Stuart, you managed somehow or other to achieve quite a lot in Glasgow, which was famous for its corruption and cronyism and all sorts of difficulties. Can you tell us a bit about whether there are any lessons from Glasgow to be learned? I think there certainly are. I mean, first off, I really did enjoy the film and I like the music and the whole pace of the thing, but I have to regard it as a piece of entertainment. I mean, it wasn't set up there as a balanced piece of reporting. There's another film and it's the other Detroit, for goodness sake. There's a million people, almost a million people living in there. Got to be some good stuff coming out of there. It can't look like bare root the whole time. You could go to any part of Glasgow still, I have to say, and some of the dock areas and see shops like that now. So don't let's get too discouraged about this. I mean, I'm in the urban development game and you have to be an optimist in any case. But from a. And I thought I'd take the couple of minutes that I was going to have here, really, to look at this from a practitioner's point of view, from. Somebody has to do something about places like this. And I think the nearest thing that maybe we've had in Britain, but I would say this anyway, is probably Glasgow in comparison to Detroit. And the questions you would ask of this Detroit that we've seen here is, has this place gone so far down this spiral of decline that the best we're likely to be able to achieve is a program of managed humane decline? That's the best we can do, maybe. Is that all that's best for Detroit, or is it still possible to effect a genuine transformation for the city? And if so, how might that be done? Well, I've already said I'm an optimist once, so I'll say it again. I am an optimist. And I think certainly in the evidence of this film, Detroit appears to have been. Become something of an anorexic in a baggy suit. My preference would still be to go for the transformational view rather than the humane decline, and would try and take Detroit to a kind of sustainable scale, a scale capable of becoming viable once more in the way that it once was in a dynamic place. It's going to take time. I was going to give a couple of examples. I think Glasgow is a good example. It was arguably the economic basket case of Great Britain. Even more so than the rest, I think. A totally hollowed out economy, masses of dereliction, big social problems. And I'm not going to pretend for a minute that these have been solved, because they haven't. But on the whole the economy, economy's back. I think we know what we do for a living in Glasgow now and that's quite important I think, given that on the economic map Glasgow was nowhere in 1975. By the year 2000 it was ranked the fifth city in Gross value added. I know that's a technical term, but it's a measure of productivity of the economy. Fifth in Britain from nowhere. Stuart, how much of that was shipbuilding? Shipbuilding finish. Well, actually we have two yards still existing. It's one of the ironies that there's still, there's still some of that old. So is it service industries that you're talking about? Yeah, yeah, that's what it is. Manufacturing hasn't declined in the same way that it has been in Manchester. I always find that one of the big ironies, arguably the, the birthplace of industry is Manchester and less than 2 of the employment in Manchester now is involved in industry and manufacturing. It's about 12 or 13% in Glasgow. It's a nice healthy balance, gives us a bit of resilience when something like this financial business comes along and hits. You got a nice balanced economy. It's not down to the buffers yet. I was going to give another example, I think of another European example, which is the Ruhr, which had become the rust belt of Germany. And I think there a big project began in 1989 involving the 17 towns and cities of the Empshire park, as it was about 2 1/2 million population and a radical take on what needs to be done in places like this. Essentially the thinking was very simple. This place had become massively unattractive. To raise a family, to live, to do business, to attract investment. So the big idea essentially was to create something called the Emshire Landscape park to physically transform the area through green spaces, forests, green. And there's a lot of resonance, I think think in what Detroit is already trying to do of its own initiative. So I think there's something to be learned from that too. I mean, I think if I was going to put the two together and say, well, what might without being too pompous, if you like that we've got this solved in Europe in the way that they haven't got it solved in Detroit. I think there are certain things which, maybe two or three things which are key in both examples. First is, I think central government needs to give a lead and it needs to give a strong direction and the level of importance of the project. And I think that's key. I think, secondly, new development institutions will have to be developed in order to take through this transformation process. Can you say what you mean by that? Yeah, I mean, I think when Glasgow's, if you like, rebirth began, it was almost marked by the setting up of the first national development agency in the UK, which was the Scottish Development Agency in 1976. And I think you can almost chart the beginning of the fight back in Glasgow from the setting up of this particular agency. Also was given a fair amount of investment money to spend, which it spent honestly. Is that right? Because the Welsh Development Agency did not have such a credit. Great reputation. What do I know about corruption? Come on. The point is, if you can say, I'm sorry to interrupt you at one level, but I'm trying to be as practical as possible, giving official bodies lots of money does not mean they will end up actually doing what they're supposed to do. And the WDA never had a private eye for all the money going in the wrong direction. Well, I don't want to comment on the wda. Sure. I mean, I guess nothing's perfect. I don't really quite know how to. I mean, I've had bigger problems than corruption and graft, for sure. I wouldn't have regarded that as a key problem. Okay, good. The key problem was knowing what to do do. I mean, faced in the teeth of this massive deindustrialization, this massive loss of jobs, this massive shift, knowing what to do was extremely difficult. And so basically what we did was what we did in Mshire park. We made the place more pleasant. We planted a lot of things, we painted a lot of things, we cleaned a lot of stone, we improved the appearance of the place. And I have to say, in all honesty, I mean, if that sounds like a well thought out strategy, it wasn't. We genuinely didn't know what to do because you don't know who to back, which projects to go. So we were stalling, we were kicking, treading water for four or five years. This is speaking out of turn, by the way, because genuinely, you don't know what to do when the economic. When you're actually there, when the economic tectonic plates are moving as this transition from a manufacturing economy to a post industrial economy. You don't realize you're on the front line, on the economic front line. You just think it's going to come back, manufacturing is going to come back, America's going to reflate and get us all going again. We would just keep paddling and wait for the rescue operation, but it didn't come. And we eventually had to start to develop new industries of our own. And I think that's when the renaissance begins. My only fear about putting forward two models that I have suggested is that we are living in much straitened circumstances now. Whether or not we can afford this, I don't know whether or not some kind of favored nation status might need to be conferred on a place like Detroit, give it a degree of favoritism, special case in order for it to do it because these things are costly and they can't be done quickly. And that might mean, as Bruce said, that we take two generations to do this rather than one generation. Thank you very much. There's a very interesting point both in your piece and indeed in a coming off of you and I'd like Richard to pick up on that. The question is the availability of low interest loans for small businesses. You know that in a way the usage, the idea of things growing organically does depend on some kind of availability of credit, I think, does it not? Sure. So can you kind of pick up on what you've been hearing and see how the process works in your mind? Well, I actually wanted to say something just a little different. Okay, say whatever you want to say. Well, one thing I suppose that may have struck many of you is that of course this looks so different from to London. And it seems very hard to think about London, Detroit in the same way. And physically that's absolutely the case. But they do share something. And what they share is that they are monocultures in terms of work. This is a monoculture of your city. In terms of automobiles. London's becoming increasingly a monoculture in terms of finance, monocultures are really bad for their cities. When something went wrong with the auto industry, all of these, all of Detroit suffered. And I'm afraid we're going to find the same thing is true in London. So there's a lesson, one lesson from this and it was, is that big in this sense, dominant is sick. To have a dominant industry, a dominant way of making jobs is a sick way for a city to live. And I'm quite worried about that in London because people, people talk about restoring the city, the city of London being the source of London's economic strength, I think that's really almost suicidal way to think about what could happen to us. I wanted to say something. I happen to know a little about Detroit. I wanted to say something a little about the planning in Detroit and something about race in it. One of the aspects that I was a consultant on a project which I withdrew from there called the Renaissance center, which you saw at the end of the project. And I'd say that many of the attitudes that eventually sickened the auto industry also sickened urban renewal efforts like that. This Renaissance center was huge. It was big. It was dedicated to bringing, not to suddenly the middle class, that means white middle class, back to Detroit. Everything was over scale. At the point at which I and the group I was working withdrew from the process. The developer, not in one way, not irrationally, was looking for bigger and bigger tenants, you know, to take more and more square footage rather than to house small businesses in this center. And when we mention the word Jane Jacobs to these Detroit planners, that started at a small scale might be a better way to regenerate the economy. They thought about urban regeneration just the way they thought about the automobile industry, which is that bigger is stronger. So I think part of the problem in your city, at least from my experience of this one project, was that the people in control thought about rescuing the city in the same way they thought about running an automobile company. And they weren't interested in small businesses at all. They hadn't read their J. Jacobs, and they should have. The third thing I want to say about this is the issue of race here and here. Roger, I would say, if I may, that I think this film, which is so well done and so on the right side, may give a slightly misleading impression. Many of the racial riots that occurred in the United states in the 60s, again in the 70s and again in the 90s, were not violent at all. Upheavals that were driven solely by unemployed black males. It wasn't the dispossessed who got involved in these riots. Oftentimes, as in Detroit, it was people who were working class, people with jobs because they were getting a terrible deal. When the Kerner Commission, which I was on, began studying, who actually got arrested in urban riots in the 60s, what we found is that many of these arrests were people who were skilled workers, people with families and so on. I think it's a very misleading, violent aspect. Of course, you can say, well, that may tend to be people who are. Who are really alienated youth and so on. But as in many urban confrontations like this, it's the issue driving people out on the street streets which counts. And that issue in Detroit, as it was in Chicago, as it was in New York police whom you have made so many films about the riots here in the 80s were anti police riots. So I just. If you ever edit this a little more, I think I'd take the, you know, the 19 year old black kid, you know, who's got a Molotov cocktail in his hand, maybe take him out and there's a different configuration of why people riot than I think is suggested. That's very helpful, thank you Richard. George view. I'm serious. Actually we're open to. We aren't just for the record, we're trying to make a longer version which will be subtler and more nuanced and hopefully get if we manage to sell it to hbo. But we needed, we didn't have enough money to make this as it was thanks to George and Julian and Caroline, they put in the extra hours. But you're right and that's helpful and we're not at all dependent. You wanted to say something about race as well. Again, when and when you start re editing the film, one additional thing you might want to do. I've been to Detroit many times, obviously don't live there but the thing that has come across to me over many years, in fact I used to work for a senator from Michigan was the black middle class that was built with the army. And the crisis of the moment, frankly, not just in the city, in the metropolis, is the impact that the collapse of this sector is having on many small and medium sized firms owned by African Americans. And the policy issue of the moment is if you can bail out gm, why can't the national government facilitate the kind of low cost lending to small firms so that they could either retool their facilities and retrain their workers for the new products coming out of the big three or alternatively diversify to clean energy, to health care. I mean if you can make gears for cars, you can make gears for hospital beds, you can, you can make gears for wind turbines, you can make gears for other infrastructure. This is the indictment right now of the way in which the Obama administration has responded to the recession. What we've seen is essentially the bailout of the major financial institutions but not enough attention to the community banks. The bailout of GM and Chrysler, but not enough attention to small and medium sized enterprises. The propping up of the housing sector, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Also the Major financial institutions, but not enough focus on retrofitting housing and employing hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people in short term, but critical and productive work. I treat what's happening in Detroit really as a proxy for the nation. And I see the need to catalyze a very different national discourse about the future of the U.S. it's not just about this city or even this metropolis. It's really about what trajectory the US is taking. Do you want to say anything about. Can you put the one back? I can. I think I'm a little out of my depth in that kind of scope. I'm a schoolteacher. But as far as the middle class, clearly I didn't even know we were middle class when I went to college. I thought middle class people wore ties to work every day. I didn't know it had anything to do with income. And everybody in my neighborhood went to college, every single body, because that was the plan our parents had for us. And pretty much everybody, a few exceptions, is doing well. But I think that there is a crisis now for the black middle class. And we talked about this earlier in Detroit, the default position was that you got a job in the auto industry. If for some reason. Well, Craig, this one boy in my neighborhood, he didn't go to college, so he went to Europe. You guys wrecked him. And then got a job in the factory. But he still made so much more money than any of us who went to college for such a long time. So it was a very strange way to. When you grow up in Detroit, I didn't realize that people work for small and medium sized companies. I thought everybody worked for. If they didn't work for the big three, then they worked for Bud Co. Which supplied the big three, which employed 10,000 people. I mean, so I think I have no indictments against the Obama administration. That was him. That was constructive criticism. But I do think that in speaking to friends and colleagues and people who are African American and are in, who are business owners or in that middle kind of business or small business, that was what they immediately expected as a part of the recovery, that that would be available to small businesses. And it wasn't. And they were just kind of stuck. They were in shock that that was not a part of the plan. So I would agree that we've got to do that. But had it not been for the auto industry, that whole development of a black middle class would not have existed in Detroit at least. I'm just not sure about the rest of the country. I don't have that. Well, actually There's a very. Stuart, that's almost a cue for you because in terms of our. And I'll come to the audience next now for questions, but that's the same deal here. The city has not been obliged to give small. No small business. No. I would just caution against getting too cozy and cuddly about the small business sector, really. I mean any dynamic economy people know requires good opportunities for self employment, for micro businesses, for small and medium businesses. And when we talk of large businesses now in the UK we talk of over 2, 200 employees, which is pretty small, it's not terribly big. A big piece of work was done, I think in the 70s and 80s in America by a kind of social geographer called Birch, I think. And he said this is where the future is all tied up, it's all in small business and this is where the future is and so on. And there was a whole kind of emotional movement about that as well. And then when we start a hidden recession in the late 80s and 90s, a lot of these new form small businesses, in fact an overwhelming majority hit the wall because they just don't have the roots, they just don't have the firepower to restrain, to be, you know, to combat what's going on in the marketplace. So we need a nice balanced economy. We do need some big guys in there because the big spenders on R D and these kinds of things need a good healthy cross section mix. Okay, now we have microphones here. Yes, please. Yeah, we do. Let's have some conversations, please don't make speeches, ask questions and keep your comments short because we have to. Yes, there's something right behind you. Sorry, there's a mic right there. Could you say who you are? If you wouldn't mind. I'm a third year undergraduate at lse. My question is housing and regeneration and tackling housing and space issues in the UK is a major issue for regeneration. How can London and other old densely populated ex industrial towns in the UK adapt the techniques used by Detroit to benefit for their future? Did I understand that correctly? The techniques used by Detroit, how can that benefit industrial towns here? Is that what you're asking? Or just general lessons perhaps to be learned through the whole of the process? Right, Stuart, I thought that was coming. I don't know if I heard it properly. Are there kind of examples that we saw in the film? What are the lessons of Detroit for the urban situations here? Well, I made a plea right at the beginning. This is my cop out that there's another film in there. I mean this is the gloomy side of Detroit that we've seen. I didn't see an awful lot in there. I mean, okay, this urban agriculture looks interesting, but I mean, we call them allotments, I think in this country, in just about every city in the UK has an enormous demand for allotments. You can't get an allotment. You can't just walk in and say, I'd like an allotment in most of the major cities in the UK now. So it's a secular thing. I mean, this interest in growing your own food and getting back to the land certainly didn't happen when I was a mature adult, but it now is. This age group that I'm looking at out here is very keen on that kind of thing and it's going to happen. So it's already happened here. The urban explorer looked interesting as a human being. I think we could have a few more of those high risk character. He was, as George will tell you, yes, you recommend urban exploring as a pastime. It's rather dangerous. Can you. I see some other hands as well. I'll take two or three questions. I'd say if you've got a bigger dog than the one you're likely to run into in the dark abandoned building and if you've got, if you've got some, yeah, some big burly people with you, then maybe, yeah, it's a fascinating opportunity to kind of experience what it might be like for people in the future to come across the relics of our age and walk around them wondering what on earth could have been in the minds of the people who built them. I mean, that really is the sensation that you get when you're in the ruins of Detroit. And that's not obviously that, that isn't the whole of the. That's not the whole story about that city. And there's a lot I want to say about that. But you know, in answer to that question, urban exploring, yeah, it really does feel like being catapulted, you know, a few hundred years into the future and getting a perspective on now that you wouldn't otherwise have. Okay, thanks. There's two hands right there in the middle and somebody down here at the front. Front. If you could bring the mic down as well. Okay, thank you. My name is Jessica Bongo. I am from the city of Detroit. I was born and raised in the city of Detroit. I went to Detroit public schools for six years. I grew up in an upper middle class neighborhood. My parents did not work for the auto industry. I still have family Living in Detroit and it doesn't look like that. And while watching this movie, I was thinking, tempted to like jump up and pull up Google Earth so that we could actually look at real neighborhoods in Detroit where people actually live. Because there are 800,000 people who do live there. So, like this to the guy in the blue, like, just because white people abandoned the city doesn't mean that the city is abandoned. And like, that's how you reference Detroit. It's not an abandoned city at all. And I know, like you gave your disclaimer about this isn't the balance picture and there's other parts of Detroit, but the problem with documentaries like this is they become very dangerous when you don't put that disclaimer in the film. A lot of people here have never been to the city of Detroit and they would think that it was Beirut if they saw this and only this. And that's not fair to people who live and are from the city. And so that's my little thing about that. But a question that I had about the film, it's not fair to Beirut. I'm sorry, not Beirut. I have Lebanese. I take your point, though. But see, the images we see of Beirut are like this. So that's what we think it looks like. He said it's a great looking city. Who knew? I mean, so moving away from the idea that this obviously is not what the Detroit that I know looks like. And I mean, Even talking about 8 Mile and Woodward, on the corner of 8 Mile and Woodward is a golf with, you know, which are invited. So, like, that is just whatever. Anyway, so an exact critique of the film, a question that I had is like the idea of identity and race in the film and that a city that is about 92% black, you chose to have mostly white people talk about that city, which I found quite interesting. And the few black people that were in there lacked identity in that you didn't say what their name was, what they did. And I just wonder, like, what was the motivation for that? Like, why didn't all of the black characters in the film get identity the way that the white characters were given identity? Yeah, that's the question that's been raised. George, you wanted to answer that. No, no, no, it's important. Very important point. Yes, please. It's a really good point. It's a really good point. We got to spend five days in Detroit before we shot the film and we got to spend 12 days in there total to do the filming and to get into the heart of a city in that kind of amount of time, obviously, is, you know, it's not going to happen. One thing in terms of why we didn't identify the black participants. Tyree Guyton is identified and Martha Reeves is identified. And Grace Lee Boggs is identified. She's not black. She's Chinese. She's Chinese, but nevertheless, she's not white. You know, there's my. It's like we're talking about white or black if we want to. The guys who participated from the Goodwill projects asked not to be identified. The guys who we spoke to, who were the whole. Were basically vox pops, asked not to be identified. You know, I would love to have had a bigger black presence. I would love to have had more representatives of a wider spectrum of the black population of Detroit. But something that I found that was really interesting was that when I was talking during the research period establishing who we were going to interview, for one reason or another, every single one of the black participants dropped out at the last minute, decided that they didn't want to participate. Now, you know, I could speculate, but I'm not going to bother speculating about the reasons. But that was the case, and I felt that it was a great shame, and I would love to have had the chance to have included a wider spectrum of black participants in the film. So, yeah, it's a definite fault in the film, which we are very aware of. And I appreciate you saying it. The person sitting next to you had their hand up as well. The same point. Okay, now, sorry. Okay. Welcome. Okay. My name is Marianne Jiang and I work at LS City. So I'm kind of in a position where I can ask. I just have two questions. One was about the urban farming and the urban agriculture, and sort of. We were. I was just wondering if the lessons that you've learned from growing your farm for 20 years, whether you have been able to. You've had an opportunity to share that best practice more widely, or whether this is the first time you've come. You mentioned South Africa before. And as to wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about what you've been doing there. Can I ask a second question? And the second question was there was a statistic in the film about 47% of Detroit being illiterate. And no one on the panel yet has spoken about education and the need for it to educate a large part of that population. You also talked about how a number of schools, many. I think 29 schools closed. 29 schools closed last year. Yeah. And I'm just wondering where the government Is, well, the local government, the municipality. Why are they on this? And why are they not trying to educate more of the youth in Detroit? First question is easier, so I'll do that one. I hadn't ever really processed taking what we know about urban farming, urban gardening outside of the city, because I was so kind of focused. My initial focus was my school is a school for pregnant parents, parenting teams. So my initial focus was this is a way for dads to earn money. I thought we would do kind of a junior achievement model so that we could front them the money. They start these little businesses, and they do that. And then I decided it's too much trouble to work with the boys, so I would do that with the girls. And then the first crop, of course, was going to be marijuana, which kind of worried me, but it's a cash crop now. We got medical marijuana. I'm thinking about that. But we did a teleconference with some students, some urban gardeners, some students in Ethiopia, and talked to them about some of the water collection things that we do at the school and some of the research we've done on that. So then that started me thinking internationally for my girls. And then we were invited to do this international entrepreneurism conference in South Africa this summer. And our role is to do eight hours of instruction in urban farming to students in South Africa. And what we leave behind, we do a community service project. And what we leave behind is, well, one will build a greenhouse and the others will do community garden that we'll leave in Soweto. But we have to plan for biointensive gardening, which is a whole kind of science of soil or whatever the size of a door. And so we've got to figure out what is the most productive use of. Because in Africa, what we're seeing is people moving out of the cities. In many countries in Africa, they're seeing the intensive migration into the cities. So they need to be able to grow food in cities. So our plan, if we raise enough money to go to South Africa, if you need to send money, you can go on the Internet. I'll do the rest of that later. But if our plan is, at this point, to now start thinking about ambassadors, our girls have made business cards and they're called urban farming ambassadors. So we hope that we'll now start sending our girls to different countries to do some of that work. Clearly, we're on our way to. We're doing the South Africa this year. We hope next year to go to Nigeria and teach the women in rural Nigeria. Nigeria about doing these things called solar suitcases. So because we built a barn a few years ago and we. It is completely solar and wind empowered and we're now in the process of bringing in some solar energy training into the school. So we hope that we start to send. Because now I think bigger. I was thinking just Detroit and I. So now I'm smarter. The announcement that I make every day at school is when you leave here today, you should be smarter than you were when you got here, because smart is what you get, not what you are. And so I'm getting smarter too. And if I get smarter, then my kids have more opportunities. So that's the plan. Why are they not educated? That number. I don't know where that number came from. I was shocked by this. 43% illiterate. I think we may have 43% of non high school graduates somewhere, but that does not necessarily equate to illiterate. And how do you measure that? There are a number of challenges in Detroit public schools. I got an email during the meeting today about they're closing more schools, but one of the reasons that they're closing schools is because we've lost a million people. And so you can't keep. I hate to say this because my school might be the. The next one, but you can't keep running buildings that were made for 800 kids with 200 kids in it. It's just not fiscally responsible. Where is government in this? I don't know, but I am of the opinion that we have to stop. And funny, my brother's favorite record when we were in college is Wade for the Government Train by Gil Scott hearing. I think we just have to stop waiting for the government training. And are we doing reform the way I think we should? No, but nobody asked me. And I think that we will do some good things. But I also think that there is some profit motive in school reform that we never talk about. And so the people who get the loudest voice and get the most votes at the tables for these discussions are not asked to do conflict of interest disclaimers. Oh, by the way, I run the charter business. Oh, by the way, I just got a contract for $40 million for books. I mean, public schools are big places, and Detroit public schools, even at our reduced capacity, is a billion dollar a year budget. So if it's a billion dollars a year, there are all kinds of people trying to get a piece of that billion. And this is a podcast. I'll see that. Okay, look, this is time we ran over slightly because we started late, and I wanted to give people a chance to talk. Is there anything that you guys want to say that we haven't touched on so far? I would just say when people graduate lse, whether you're American or not, if you want to go to the places where the most innovation is going to happen in the United States, go to Detroit, go to Cleveland, go to Youngstown, go to Pittsburgh, go to Buffalo. Something is happening in the US and your generation is going to make it happen. And then hopefully, you're going to force political leaders to make the right choices for the next generation. That's a very good point. I don't think any of us could follow that. We wish you all well in changing the world. We need it. Thank you very much for coming and for your attention.