The U.S. Social Forum came to town, and so did the media

If you spent any time in Detroit last week you probably noticed the exorbitant amount of young, bike-riding, tattoo-having activists walking around Midtown, Downtown, and pretty much everywhere in the city. With them they brought the blogs and news outlets (the most mainstream probably the Huffington Post), to cover the USSF and what's going on here in Detroit.

Excerpt from the Nation:

But Detroit's symbolic power was was one of the reasons the city was chosen as the Social Forum's site. Detroit has a deep history of social movements, of defiantly making do in the absence of even the most basic institutional support. And its postindustrial abandonment stands as a powerful symbol of the wreckage neoliberalism leaves in its tracks and of what—if all of us inside and outside the Social Forum doors don't get busy fast—the future might look like for the rest of the country.

Read the entire article here.

Excerpt from TruthDig:

Forty-seven years later, thousands of people, of every hue, religion, class and age, might not have used those words exactly, but they marched down that same avenue here in Detroit in the same spirit, opening the U.S. Social Forum. More than 10,000 citizens, activists and organizers have come from around the world for four days of workshops, meetings and marches to strengthen social movements and advance a progressive agenda. Far larger than any tea party convention, it has gotten very little mainstream-media coverage. Not a tightly scripted, staged political convention, or a multiday music festival, the U.S. Social Forum defines itself as "an open meeting place for reflective thinking, democratic debate of ideas, formulation of proposals, free exchange of experiences." It is appropriate that the U.S. Social Forum should be held here, in this city that has endured the collapse of the auto industry and the worst of the foreclosure crisis. In Detroit, one is surrounded, simultaneously, by stark failures of capitalism and by a populace building an alternative, just and greener future.

Read the entire article here.

A post from DC Food for All titled "Another world is possible: A view from Detroit" here.

A piece on the Greening of Detroit via the Progressive here.

A Democracy Now! piece about urban agriculture and farming here.

The Huffington Post chimes in with a piece titled "Detroit: A Model of Renewal for the U.S. Social Forum?" here.