Week One

Dear Kayla –

Today was day 4 of the 10 weeks I will spend with Southwest Detroit Environmental Vision. This experience got off to a bit of a slow start, although that tends to be common with new jobs. The first few days were spent getting acclimated to the office and the work that last years intern accomplished. While the industrial, windowless office can be a bit intimidating, the people inside make the office feel cozy and welcoming. It looks like there are going to be many opportunities to get out of the office and into the community which is an exciting prospect. Today we met with some of the lawyers at Great Lakes Environmental Law Center who are collaborating with us to update the anti-idling ordinance and now I feel as though I have a much clearer idea of potential focus areas for this summer and it is reassuring to have some clear objectives!

From the looks of it I will be able to flex my data collection skills by identifying hotspots for truck idling in Southwest Detroit (yay opportunity to get outside!) and learn about how to map those hotspots with the help of some coworkers. I’m also excited about the prospect of doing a lot of outreach work with the police force in Southwest Detroit, community members to identify hotspots, and truck drivers to learn about their idling behaviors.

As far as my current perception of Detroit, to be honest I’m not quite sure. On one hand there’s the Detroit I knew throughout high-school; the young hip restaurants and coffee-shops we would come take pictures in on the weekends, feeling as though these establishments represented Detroit. Feeling as though we belonged in Detroit and Detroit belonged to us. After reading How to Kill a City and working outside of the centralized Downtown/Midtown/Corktown area I see that these places that are designed to be cool and hip only make up a small portion of Detroit and they were designed to attract people like us (affluent kids from the suburbs). I can definitely see how there are two different cities living next to each other, there are blocks side-by-side that look like they don’t belong together. Like the sky sucked up two streets from different cities and then plopped them down next to each-other. I’m not sure what to make of it but I’m looking forward to learning more about all of the different sides of Detroit and getting to know its people better. I’m sure that by the end of these 10 weeks my perception will have changed a lot.

-Kayla