this month, i’m having a hard time pinning down a blog topic. a lot has happened in april: i moved from rivertown to midtown, my mom came to spend a week and i went to the dia for the first time with her, the weather is teasing us with a few nice days, i’ve been doing yoga regularly, i went to a panel on gentrification, an art gallery crawl, an egg hunt, saw bill clinton on the block over from my apartment, saw my brightest diamond live at trinosophes…and those last five were all in the same day.

but what i think i want to talk about relates to our current challenge and highlights a great cultural asset of the city: the detroit riverfront.

our fifth challenge of the year is entitled “activating public spaces.” (appropriately timed, since i’ve gone to two placemaking workshops in the last couple weeks). we are working with the detroit riverfront conservancy to help bring awareness to their organization (plenty of people know the riverwalk but only few know that it’s been made possible by the DRFC) and to encourage the community to engage with the space. we have also created an interactive mural and are hosting an event to feature it.

for all of our challenges, we’ve been required to do empathy exercises to put ourselves in the place of the user, the person or group our non-profit partner serves. these experieinces help us design and create so that the user’s needs are met. but they are usually contained within one of our four workday fridays and involve hypothetical situations or tours of spaces.

during this challenge however, i was able to experience the riverfront first-hand, independently of any challenge-related activity, and surrounded by a bunch of other people. i participated in detroit central city community mental health‘s annual 5K run for literacy. (we won’t get into the details. suffice it to say i began to train but suffered overuse injuries that resulted in me walking the thing).

for a morning, i was in the space that i have been dedicating my time to over the last couple of weeks. and having 50 minutes to myself to just walk and think, i was able to let that sink in.
i had my picture taken in front of the carousel.
i walked past the mural we painted two weeks ago and saw all the chalk responses to our painted prompt “the dequindre cut is __.”
i was able to point at the freshly-painted green, graffiti-free electrical boxes and say, i did that.
being a user of a place i’m helping work on, in the midst of other users who will benefit from that work, was powerful and gratifying and really gave meaning to the work that we as fellows are doing.