It started at the beginning of the semester, when my Iranian roommate talked about his Urban Planning and Design coursework. "You're from Detroit?" he asked. "We're studying Detroit." When I asked why, he just kind of laughed and shrugged. "Maybe because it needs to be rebuilt." OK, so we have an entire classroom of students trying to figure out how to rearrange my hometown. Good luck to them.
Now, my business module seems to be experiencing some odd syncronocity with the poor city. So far:
- In Week 1, we did a case study on Gale Cengage. I said to my workshop team, "That's in my hometown." Its headquarters is in Farmington Hills, not far from where I live. At the end of class, the professor, who is English, was running down the list of all Cengage divisions and described Gale as being "I forget where, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, where you'd never want to go." I quickly raised my hand and enlightened her. "Michigan, m'am."
- In Week 2, this same professor described a sales conference she had been to as part of the Gale Cengage team. "It was somewhere out of the way like Grand Rapids and it was just awful." I hoped she meant the conference, not Grand Rapids. GR is actually quite nice.
- In Week 3, we're reading in our textbook about international M&A. What's the case study (non-publishing related)? The "celebrated" and "successful" merger of Daimler-Benz in Germany and Chrysler in Auburn Hills, Michigan, USA. What the copyeditors didn't know when they published this edition is that Daimler would sell off most of its Chrysler holdings in 2009, Chrysler would go bankrupt and get bailed out by the US government and -- hooray! -- get bought back up by Fiat. (Fiat is an Italian automaker whose name it is often suggested is an acronym for "Fix It Again, Tony".) Though Chrysler seems to have bounced back fairly well by now, my guess is they'll be suggesting a new case study for the fifth edition.
Not one to take the news lying down, in Week 4, a defiant grassroots movement in Detroit raised $60,000 to build a Robocop statue near the abandoned Michigan Central Station. Now that's what I call "rising from the ashes". I'll bet they didn't see that one coming in Urban Design.
Now, my business module seems to be experiencing some odd syncronocity with the poor city. So far:
- In Week 1, we did a case study on Gale Cengage. I said to my workshop team, "That's in my hometown." Its headquarters is in Farmington Hills, not far from where I live. At the end of class, the professor, who is English, was running down the list of all Cengage divisions and described Gale as being "I forget where, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, where you'd never want to go." I quickly raised my hand and enlightened her. "Michigan, m'am."
- In Week 2, this same professor described a sales conference she had been to as part of the Gale Cengage team. "It was somewhere out of the way like Grand Rapids and it was just awful." I hoped she meant the conference, not Grand Rapids. GR is actually quite nice.
- In Week 3, we're reading in our textbook about international M&A. What's the case study (non-publishing related)? The "celebrated" and "successful" merger of Daimler-Benz in Germany and Chrysler in Auburn Hills, Michigan, USA. What the copyeditors didn't know when they published this edition is that Daimler would sell off most of its Chrysler holdings in 2009, Chrysler would go bankrupt and get bailed out by the US government and -- hooray! -- get bought back up by Fiat. (Fiat is an Italian automaker whose name it is often suggested is an acronym for "Fix It Again, Tony".) Though Chrysler seems to have bounced back fairly well by now, my guess is they'll be suggesting a new case study for the fifth edition.
Not one to take the news lying down, in Week 4, a defiant grassroots movement in Detroit raised $60,000 to build a Robocop statue near the abandoned Michigan Central Station. Now that's what I call "rising from the ashes". I'll bet they didn't see that one coming in Urban Design.
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