News

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A coat that transforms into a sleeping bag? How did you come up with that idea?
This started as a class project at the College for Creative Studies here in Detroit. The assignment was to design a product that filled a social need, and the biggest need I saw here in the city was homelessness.

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"My cell phone was blowing up. It was 7:30 in the morning, two hours before I usually get up. It kept ringing, buzzing. I finally checked it. People were sending me pictures of the place I bought, the Imagination Station, on fire. Mary and I got in the car and drove over. It's two blocks from where I live, and a small crowd was standing around, watching it burn. I didn't know what to think. Someone suggested it was started by kids shooting off fireworks. I don't know. We didn't have any enemies."

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Politics and finances may have dominated the news in Detroit so far this year, but there's much more to know about the city in 2013. Here's 10 reasons why Detroit is worth believing in this year.

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Detroit does not necessarily need to become a bike-friendly city, said Mike Mackool, co-founder of Detroit Bike City, at that event's second installment in the Cobo Center on [in March].

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Detroit Venture Partners LLC is expected to announce today that it has led an investment round of $750,000 in Chalkfly, a Detroit-based startup that sells office supplies online.

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Now that the New International Trade Crossing (NITC) between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario appears to be moving forward, bicycle advocates are seeing to it that a bike path is built along with the bridge.

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The Knight Arts Challenge—Detroit runs now through April 22. Are you ready?

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As Detroiters, we are facing many serious challenges in our community. Now more than ever, we each need to amplify our own positive impact. If each of us improves our give-take ratio by only 15%, our community becomes unstoppable.

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While the state took over Detroit’s finances and Kwame Kilpatrick received guilty verdicts last week, Detroit City Council approved a zoning ordinance that legalizes urban farming in Detroit. WDET's Laura Weber-Davis speaks with Kami Pothukuchi, Associate Professor of Urban Planning at Wayne State University, about the urban agriculture zoning ordinance and why it's important to gardeners and farmers in Detroit.

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One of the main factors businesses consider when deciding on where to relocate or expand is the available pool of college-educated workers. And that has cities competing for college-educated young adults. “The American population, contrary to popular opinion, is not very mobile, but there is one very significant exception, what we call ‘the young and the restless,’” explains Lee Fisher, president of CEOs for Cities, a national not-for-profit organization that helps U.S. cities map out economic growth.

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StartingBloc is a global community of 1900 social entrepreneurs from 55 countries with a mission of creating lasting change that will hold its first ever Institute for Social Innovation in Detroit in August.

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This year, the Knight News Challenge has been soliciting project proposals that would open up and leverage government data anywhere at the national, state and local levels (in the U.S. and abroad). As of last week, 886 projects are vying for a share of the $5 million in funding, all in response to this question: "How can we make the places we live more awesome through data and technology?"

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A couple of months ago, we asked you to send nominations for our list of 100 individuals we should rally behind in 2013. The dazzling array that follows, curated from your submissions, consists of trailblazers and truth-tellers, defenders and disrupters, inventors and inciters, but they all share one basic trait: They are DOers.

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If Detroit is going to survive, it’s going to take more than the efforts of advertising shops: It’s going to require a lot of people rolling up their sleeves and making things. Luckily, the town is full of builders and artisans--some homegrown, others drawn to the city for its cheap rents and generous business incentives--who are doing their best to refurbish America’s biggest fixer-upper.

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We all know Detroit has great artists and art galleries. We all know Chicago has great artists and art galleries. But what would happen if the two came together … it could be way cool.

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