Looping Detroit: A People Mover Travelogue

Equal parts urban culture and poetic travelogue, Looping Detroit is a collection of observations each taking place in and around one station stop of Detroit's People Mover. Built in 1987, the People Mover was and is largely regarded as a public transit boondoggle--costly, circumscribed, and, in light of these, a particularly egregious investment within a city lacking sufficient public transportation. At a time when Detroit's downtown development is booming, with tremendous investment in a downtown that was ignored for decades, the very real possibility exists that this new interest will parallel the same investment patterns that brought the over-invested People Mover to a fragment of the city. Looping Detroit invites artists and writers to ride the small loop as an explorer, mining the environs around each station as a poetic ramble, a psycho-geographic wander, a cultural inquiry that simultaneously ponders the poetics of circulating above the city streets while probing the greater narrative of Detroit's public transit conundrum. Contributors include award winning Detroit novelists Lolita Hernandez and Michael Zardoorian, poets Gloria House and Walter Lacy, music producer Cornelius Harris, Chace MicWrite Morris, front man of the Detroit hip-hop trio Coldmen Young, and radio producer Zak Rosen.