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Detroit DisneyTown


What if there was a neighborhood in Detroit that was artificially made to look like it came from another part of the world? Well, I could be talking about African Town but I’m not. Nor am I talking about Asian Village or the ethnic city of Hamtramck or Mexican Town or any of the other ethnic neighborhoods in Detroit. I’m talking about what Leavenworth, Washington in the 1960s by deciding to make the town have a Bavarian theme which applied to the way the buildings looked and followed with traditional Bavarian festivals. Why did they do this? As a logging town their economy had declined up until that point and they decided they would turn their town into a theme town in order to attract tourists. And it worked. Of course Detroit is much too big to do this comprehensively. It’s far bigger than most European cities. But it does have that French name and background. So would it be possible to take a couple otherwise underused blocks of the city and convert them into a small French town? They could probably preserve the existing street names. How hard would this be? I mean, look at Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project, which transformed a neighborhood through the labor of one man and a bunch of neighborhood kids. Could such an ad hoc, low-tech approach work for redecorating the exteriors of some currently abandoned houses? Without having to convert every house on the block to the new style until the owner decided they wanted to join in the fun? Could this approach worked to turn more of Mexican Town into a tourist area as well as Arabian Village near Southwest Detroit or Chaldean Town? One building at a time.

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