What Detroit needs is to promote Tourism! Tourism, you say? Are you out of your gourd? Who, in their right mind, is going to look upon Detroit as a vacation destination when it is seen as a dangerous, desolate, crumbling failure of a city? Exactly. No one. That is why Detroit has to change its image. Because I know two things about America. One is the proverbial “When you have lemons, make lemonade” success formula, and the other is that we love theme parks. In fact, we already have “theme park cities.” Ever heard of Las Vegas, Branson or Atlantic City? I also know one more thing, which is that we flock to movies that depict dystopian visions of the future: Blade Runner, Minority Report, Total Recall, Rollerball, The Hunger Games, and many others. That is why the key to Detroit rebounding quickly from its chaos is not to resist and fight its problems, but to embrace them. Turn them into an attraction. Have the courage to say that Detroit as a functioning city is no more, that its future is bleak, hopeless and unrelentingly grim. But that that’s a good thing. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the nation’s next major attraction, a real-life “adventure ride,” the anti-Disneyland. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you… DYSTROIT Motto: Tomorrow’s Dystopia – Today! DYSTROIT: Detroit, dystopia, destroyed. Why be bilked by smiling giant rodents, “goofy” dogs and artificially cheerful acne-faced teenagers in uniforms when you can be robbed by real-life criminals? Dystroit – where around every corner lurks a new thrill! Dystroit – where you’re not passively roping through a long line to go on a two minute ride, but must use your ingenuity to survive! Dystroit – a place so forlorn and hopeless that when you return to your dysfunctional town, you think, “Y’know, things could be a lot worse…” Visit Dystroit’s exciting neighborhoods like Mad Max-ville, and, the newly named Panem Woods (replacing Palmer Woods) which embodies the man-eats-man mentality of America’s newest theme park. All right. You’re thinking, “Listen, you boob. You just can’t give Detroit a new name, charge admission and expect tourists to come to be mugged.” Right again! That’s why Dystroit will employ the current real criminals as fake criminals. Their guns will be exchanged for lifelike facsimiles shooting blanks. Similarly, all the dilapidated hotels will be turned into faux fixer-uppers. Admittedly, I don’t have all the answers to how this will be implemented. But then again, Walt Disney had the vision: it was the designers and architects who turned it into a reality. But I do know this: when “money” is coming to a town in the way of the next Olympics or Super Bowl, tremendous resources are suddenly poured into long-neglected areas and are utterly transformed in incredibly short times. Present city-planners with Dystroit, a dystopian theme-park that will attract tourists from all over, and watch things get done. You might actually wind up with a functional city, say, Detroit. article-3/dealing-with-americas-dystopian-city-detroit-912211
Posted on: Sat, 20 Jul 2013 04:23:24 +0000
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