In Search of Community - Novi, Wixom and Northville, Michigan

In Search of Community

In Search of Community: The Price of Sprawl

This is a story about the search for and loss of community. What happens when strangers are drawn together in new subdivisions with no history or traditions to bind them? What happens to those they displace? What happens to the communities they leave behind? Come, travel with me as and explore a bleeding edge of Detroit Metropolitan sprawl as it moves planlessly outward along the ancient Indian trail of Grand River driven on by dreams, speculation and the search for community.

Tiled fountains perform to a missing audience before a never-occupied store on a Saturday night in October, 2006 at Novi, Michigan's Fountain Walk shopping Mall.

Viewed from the opposite opposite side the same vista of perfected bleakness greets the visitor.

Opened amid much fanfare in eager anticipation of the rapidly growing Detroit suburb of Novi, Fountain Walk presents an image of grandeur in a spirit reminiscent of Las Vegas' Caesar's Palace. But failure to attract retailers into its immense 'big box' spaces instead present a disturbingly cold and forbidding face to arriving visitors.

Meanwhile, on Joseph Campau at Davison in the City of Detroit, another abandoned retail hulk, the Lasky Building with its halcyon days behind it, sits long unoccupied and of no interest to retailers.

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Created by Lowell Boileau

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