While the recent media cycle on Detroit’s bankruptcy often reads like a eulogy to one of America’s great industrial boomtowns, Richard C. Harwood, who heads the Harwood Institute for Public Innovation, sees signs of life. Harwood points to a number of positive signs in the city, including companies moving downtown, building renovations and venture capital funds being formed.
All of these improvements “are pockets of change that suggest that a new path forward can emerge.”
The key to focusing and sustaining Detroit’s resurgence lies not in balancing the books, however, but in rebuilding the community. Harwood explains that in spite of the extremely abstract conversations being had about the city’s finances, “we can’t lose sight of the fact that we’re really looking at people in a community.”
