STORY VIA MODEL D
Director Aaron Woolf has just started a nationwide tour promoting his PBS documentary on transit and Detroit, Blueprint America: Beyond the Motor City. Before the tour, though, he was concerned Detroit would fall victim to the “Thank God for Mississippi” syndrome.
Years ago, when Woolf was away at college in Vermont, he met a kid from Alabama who razzed him with: “Thank God for Mississippi.” What? asked Woolf, who has family in Mississippi but was raised in Baltimore. The kid answered: “You know how Alabama is usually 49th in most of the statistics that measure prosperity and economic vitality? Well Mississippi is always 50th. So dang it if we aren’t always saying, ‘Thank God for Mississippi.’ ”
Woolf worried a similar scenario would play out as he told Detroit’s story. “I had this kind of fear that other cities would say, ‘Thank God for Detroit,’ ” he says. Thankfully, “it hasn’t been that at all.”
“I think a lot of cities can look at Detroit and instead of saying, ‘Thank God for Detroit,’ they can say ‘There are profound lessons for me,’ ” he says. “That was my greatest hope, and that seems to be coming true so far.”
Woolf’s tour stops in Detroit at 6 p.m. Tuesday, March 18, at Wayne State University’s Law School. There will be discussion and a screening of the documentary, which first aired nationally on PBS in February.
Woolf says that the message of his documentary is to tell the story of how decades of automobile-centric infrastructure policies have been detrimental to the nation’s economy, through the lens of what’s happened in Detroit.
“To me this film — even though it is ostensibly about Detroit — it is so thoroughly about the whole country,” he says. “If you had to shrink the whole movie down into one sentence or one thing, it would be: Infrastructure choices have consequences. The way your promote people getting around has a profound impact on how you shape communities.”
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