DETROIT: Place and Space to Begin Anew

Last Saturday I spoke at the 2012 biennial gathering of Kellogg Fellows meeting at the Detroit Westin.

This year’s theme was “Resilience, Transformation, Transcendence.”

Also on the program was Dr. Regina Benjamin, the U.S. Surgeon General who is a Kellogg Fellow.

In my remarks I described how drastically Detroit has changed since I moved to the city 60 years ago.

In 1953 it was a city of two million. The Chrysler plant where Jimmy worked employed 17,000 workers. If you threw a stone up in the air in our neighborhood the chances were that it would hit a Chrysler worker on the way down.

Two years later, because of Hi-Tech and decentralization, that same plant employed only 2000 workers. If you threw a stone up in the air, the chances were that it would land on a vacant lot.