DETROIT: Road to Renaissance A Regeneration Model Presentation to Creative Clusters Conference London, UK November 13, 2007

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Rosamund Benson
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1 DETROIT: Road to Renaissance A Regeneration Model Presentation to Creative Clusters Conference London, UK November 13, 2007 Cadillac s and Mustangs This is Detroit. Motown and Eminem They are Detroit. Attitude and Passion That is Detroit. The Arsenal of Democracy and the Middle Class This was Detroit. The word Detroit generates emotion. We work hard and make things people use every day. We feel pain and passion that comes out in our music. We think big -big business, big labor, big roads and big cars. We define the American industrial city and all that is good and bad about it. This is Detroit. Detroit helped write the story of America. A story of industrial might - racial and labor tension - economic opportunity - innovation - entrepreneurship. But like many 20 th century industrial cities, Detroit has some economic challenges today. We ve lost many high paying manufacturing jobs as productivity improved. Our automotive industry is transitioning as it addresses global challenges. We are shedding an entitlement mindset cultivated by years of seemingly unlimited good paying jobs that required few skills. Our reliance on a few big institutions to take care of our social and community needs doesn t work in a flat world. Yet in spite of these challenges, Detroit continues to write the American story as it transitions from the old to the new economy. Most American cities have focused on growing the technology, tourism or financial services sectors as their path to growth. In Detroit we are building on our roots and core values to write a new economic chapter. Values rooted in making things that we use every day that has an emotional connection with people. The cars and music that define us have those emotional connections. And they are symbolic of the creative economy at work.

2 Leveraging the assets the automotive industry gave us, Detroit is launching an aggressive effort to use the creative economy as an economic transformation engine. And Detroit s creative assets are considerable. Consider that Detroit has the 5 th greatest concentration of creative workers in the US. These include people working in advertising, marketing, architecture, industrial design and music and fashion. While often overshadowed by or a sub-component of the auto industry, this creative workforce and the businesses they are part of give us a competitive advantage to grow this sector of our economy. So how did we come to recognize that creativity was at the core of our regional DNA and that it could be the key to our economic future? Detroit Renaissance, the organization I manage, is a private entity led by our region s chief executives that develops strategies and supports actions that grow the region s economy. Over the past two years we focused on identifying the greatest opportunities we had for transforming our economy. We called it the Road to Renaissance. The Road to Renaissance is a highly focused plan that identified 6, not 60, strategies for growing our economy. We knew the failure of many economic growth strategies is that they over-reach and are hard to measure. So we built in quantifiable metrics and are publicizing quarterly progress reports that encourage the public and media to track results. And often these plans are heavily dependent on scarce public resources to work. So ours is largely funded by the private sector. The plan is aimed at growing key sectors of the economy and building the economic infrastructure we need to transform our region. Specifically, it highlighted the importance of continuing to grow the mobility sector that has defined Detroit -- To use our airport as the anchor of a global logistics hub -- To cultivate entrepreneurs -- To retain and attract talent -- To better communicate our assets to the world. But the strategy that could most define our future may be our effort to grow the creative economy. That strategy involves five steps. - Map and network our creative assets. - Grow creative density in the heart of our central city. - Accelerate the growth of successful creative companies. - Attract more creative companies. - And tell our story. The first step is mapping and networking our creative assets. It is critical to identify the people, businesses and assets that make up Detroit s creative

3 landscape. It helps the creative community network and collaborate to discover new applications and markets for their work. It gives us information we can use to market our creative capabilities to firms or people who might consider doing business or moving to our region. It also helps document the economic impact the creative economy. This is especially important in region s that are trying to demonstrate the importance of economic diversification. Second, we are growing creative density in the heart of downtown Detroit. We are a big city and a big region. Unfortunately, our creative businesses, assets and workers aren t concentrated in one or two nodes within the region; they are dispersed across all of it. That creates a challenge for Detroit to take advantage of our creative asset base. So we are trying to rectify this by growing and attracting creative businesses along a major corridor in downtown Detroit. This corridor already has four indigenous nodes of creative clusters. The corridor includes an emerging music district anchoring one end, an entertainment district just to the north, an arts and culture district, and a creative education institution anchoring the other end. Our initiative involves completing a development plan that ties together these different nodes of activity into a unique environment. Each node will retain its own identity, but will become part of a larger district that gives the visitor and resident the realization that they are entering a city within the city. The development plan will likely include streetscapes, signage and in-fill development projects. But it might also include the creation of street fairs, street art and other public amenities that brings life to the district. A third element of our creative economy strategy is to accelerate the growth of successful creative companies and help new ones get formed. We all know the success business accelerators and many incubators have had helping grow technology-based companies. Our plan is to take a similar approach for the creative sector. A creative business accelerator will be located within the Creative Corridor I just described. It will provide the typical services one might expect at any business accelerator, including business planning, financial planning, networking, marketing and administrative services. It will also include incubation space for a number of companies and be the home for our creative economy initiative. A fourth element is to attract more businesses to the Creative Corridor and the region as a whole. We are identifying state of the art incentives and inducements. For example, we are looking at ways to transform the industrial orientation of our tax policies and incentives to the creative sector. We are also exploring entirely

4 new approaches to business attraction, such as focusing entrepreneurs rather than established companies. The fifth element of the strategy is to tell our story, something we haven t done a very good job at in the past. The preconceptions people have of Detroit hurt our ability to expose them to our creative assets. But our biggest challenge may be getting people within our own region to recognize our community as a place where creativity thrives. So, initially, much of our communications effort will be focused internally to raise awareness among residents for our creative asset base, economic impact and future plans. Only when your local community embraces the creative economy can you hope to have a compelling story to tell outsiders. Underlying the five elements of our creative economy initiative is one fundamental principle. We are embracing who we are. This sounds simple, but few communities seem to follow it. In the world of economic development, every community claims it is high-tech. In tourism, everyone promotes themselves as the perfect family destination. There is more sameness and very little differentiation between communities. We are taking a different path. We are embracing the fact that Detroit is different than most cities. For example, with tourism, we are appealing to adult travelers and have based our marketing efforts around this fact. We are doing the same with the creative economy initiative. We are focused on the creative economy, not the creative class. Further, we are focusing on both the old and new parts of the Creative economy. - Advertising firms and audio technophiles. - Industrial designers and indigenous artists. We don t believe you have to be young and avant-garde to be in the creative economy. It s also about coming up with new applications of what you do well. So if you see handbags made out of seat belts or new buildings made out of composite materials, you ll know it s from Detroit! So how will we know in the strategy is working? We can already see the impacts of the creative economy on the regeneration of Detroit. - New housing permits are leading the state, fueled by a growth in young professional and empty-nest residents moving into the area surrounding the Creative Corridor.

5 - New resident surveys indicate one of the primary reasons they moved to the area was the presence of cultural assets and a creative economy-based workforce. In fact many of the new residents are reverse commuters that live downtown and commute to the suburbs to work. - New creative sector businesses and assets are locating in the Corridor. - Grassroots groups are being formed to network people interested in cultivating the creative economy. There are a few lessons I can share from our experience so far that might help with your own community s efforts to build a creative economy cluster. - Map your assets and build on what you have. Seek growth by networking the sum of the whole rather than feeling like you must build the new. - Keep in mind that economic growth is the output that will sustain interest in the initiative. - Enlist public-private partnerships. Growing the creative sector is not something the public sector can do on its own. It takes business groups within the sector and private sector leadership to sustain the initiative and give it street credibility. - Perhaps most of all, be authentic. So this is the story of Detroit. There are many parts of our story that are those of countless other industrial cities across the globe. There is a bright future in those cities. It rests not on becoming something they are not. It rests on building off the assets and personality that made them what they were into something new again. These cities were once new. They still can be new again.

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