Reaching Across Borders in Detroit
Since moving to Ann Arbor three years ago, I began looking for opportunities to engage with communities in southern Michigan. Community engagement is always easier when you live close by. One such community is Detroit’s Eastside — once a thriving, diverse, cosmopolitan residential area, now a neighborhood outsiders tend to avoid. Factories of America’s big auto makers still crowd the landscape, but the only local residents are those who could not leave for better opportunities as the city’s economy crumbled, or those who despite opportunities elsewhere, chose to stay in the only place they called home.
Starting in late 2015, Tawanna Dillahunt (a fellow faculty member at the University of Michigan School of Information) and I worked together with a non-profit, the Eastside Community Network, to see if Eastside residents would be interested in giving tours of their neighborhood. A small group of interested people — all matronly African-American women — responded to the call. We advertised the potential for supplementary income, but what they all wanted was to tell a story about a Detroit they didn’t hear in the media — a story about the city’s proud, if complicated, historic heritage.
We held monthly meetings for about a year to brainstorm, plan, and rehearse a tour. On the one hand, it was quite a change for me, compared with the rural Indian contexts that I had worked in over the previous decade. For one thing, language was not a barrier. I could talk, joke, laugh, and cry with everyone without an interpreter. Friendship was a real possibility. For another, our interaction was a true partnership, one in which our participants contributed as much, if not more, to the project as we did. They knew the history of the Eastside. They had relevant social networks. They had related experience, or knew people who had. In our drives to and from Detroit, Tawanna and I would always wonder what more we could do to support the tours beyond what seemed like little more than tech support and project management.
On the other hand, the project reconfirmed something I had seen throughout my life and which has in recent years become a focus of my research: that the essence of all human development — whether it is K-12 education, research mentorship, or community development — is human nurturing. In the end, Tawanna and my contributions to the project came down to just three things: (1) our ability to market the tours to Ann Arbor residents (who were willing to pay a higher ticket price than local Detroiters); (2) our setting up a tour website and payment system; and (3) our ongoing faith in and encouragement of our participant partners. Of these, the first two could be made simpler and more automated — indeed, it could be argued that this is exactly what shared-economy apps do for their service providers.
But, the last depends on caring human attention — the one thing that no technology today or on the horizon can supply, superhuman AI notwithstanding. The need for human attention is what carves the socio-technical chasm that faces any tech-heavy attempt to cause meaningful social change. Our participants cited the mere fact that Tawanna and I were willing to make a one-hour roundtrip to meet with them each month as evidence of our trust in them and belief in the project. Technological means to eliminate that commute — whether by video teleconference or driving robots — would have destroyed the very thing that mattered, just as a computer-generated thank-you note is meaningless compared with a handwritten one.
In international development, people often speak of the “last mile” of service delivery — the long, hard last mile that, due to bad roads, poor governance, or ungraspable diversity, is harder to cross than the first nine hundred and ninety nine. Some like to call this the “first mile” in an attempt at user-centeredness, but the real problem with the metaphor is the allusion to distance, as if the problem were a physical challenge. In fact, the distance is no more than arm’s length. What is needed is at once simple and scarce — “just” the human act of reaching out.
Among computer scientists, I sometimes joke that meaningful social change is social-change-complete, in analogy with NP-completeness. The class of problems that cannot be solved without significant human attention are all of the same class of complexity; they cannot be reduced to simpler problems solvable with technology alone. Arguably, social change is not a “problem” at all, any more than our own personal growth is a problem. We are all works in progress in need not of “solutions,” but of acknowledgment and encouragement.
In the end, two members of the original group — Minnie Lester and Delores Orr — gave a Bootleggers’ Tour of the Eastside, in which they took visitors to sites from Detroit’s Prohibition-era history. The tour filled two busloads of paying visitors, comfortably netting a profit. Delores, who had leadership experience at work and at church, was surprised to find her skills translate naturally to tour-giving. Minnie, who used to run her own tour with a paid historian as guide, learned that she could give future tours herself. Their contributions not only to the tour but to our research project were such that we asked them to be co-authors on our paper. This year, with new research collaborators Julie Hui and Joyojeet Pal, and with Delores and Minnie as tour-guide mentors, we continued and expanded the tours.
For more about this project, see our CHI 2018 paper. For more thoughts on human development, see Geek Heresy. To book a tour in Detroit, see the Real Detroit Tours homepage.
