Look beyond autos and you can see…

1. A NEW WAY OF GROWING DETROIT: Spend just a few minutes with any group of young professionals in Detroit and you're likely to hear metaphors about fresh palates, re-creating from the ground up, and pioneering in an original place rather than following the youthful hoards to the trendy, over-priced cities on the coasts. Calls are coming in regularly for Detroit – one of the largest municipal land tracts anywhere and 30 percent vacant – to reinvent itself as a new, green landscape of urban forests and neighborhood and commercial farms. Center for Michigan steering committee member and state policy guru Craig Ruff is among those advocating this new vision: "I suggest that Detroit evolves, with much state and federal support, into a unique 21st-century American city. That it caters to those athletically and culturally inclined who wish to escape density and intensity of other large cities and have easy access to amenities and daily staples.
Detroit, in short, becomes a myriad of Central Parks: the greenest large city in America, indeed the world."

2. MSU's ISOTOPES: As Fresh Thoughts discussed last week, Michigan State's new nuclear facility creates a new kind of economic diversification and illustrates the role of universities as economic engines and magnets for capital investment in the public interest.

3. UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN'S BEEFED UP RESEARCH VISION: Two years ago, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer cast a pall over Ann Arbor by announcing it was leaving its research campus in Ann Arbor, costing the region hundreds of high-paying, high-tech jobs. This week, the University of Michigan bought the site for $108 million and pledged to bring in 2,000 new high-tech, high-paying research jobs over the next decade. The plan includes medical and biotech research and spinoff businesses. The transition means continued short-term pain, as the city loses tax base, but potential long-term diversification away from a one-drug-maker dependency trap.