"Corktown Studios is an artist collective located in Detroit’s re-emerging North Corktown Neighborhood providing affordable studios for its members as well as exhibition space for area artists and the community. Corktown Studios, in conjunction with complementary rejuvenation projects in the neighborhood (hospitality, housing, agriculture) aims to contribute to the emerging identity of the area as a diverse and accessible hub for community-oriented creatives."
Inherent here, is the suggestion that this neighborhood is without, or at least seeking to upgrade, an identity. No disrespect, of course, is intended towards the long term resident of the neighborhood whose identity image of the area is exactly ‘home’ and needs no academic analysis and prescription to affirm it as such.
Like a more subjective (and suggestive) masterplan, though, the perceived identity of a re-emerging neighborhood will, inevitably, guide development and rehabilitation, inform the character of the newer transplant demographic, and impact the adjacent communities.
The identity of North Corktown, as the CS mission statement suggests, is already reemerging as an accessible hub for community area creatives. With an ever increasing footprint of community gardens (11 in total, by last informal count) rehabilitation of multi-family residential units, the addition of the hostel, the adjacency to the student- oriented Woodbridge neighborhood and to the hip-yet-established Corktown Proper, and the opening of art-based event and studio spaces such as ours, the proper components of ‘place’ exist, albeit disconnected.
Within a broader effort to provide a signature hub for this community (a ‘main street’, a ‘branded face’) which may eventually embody, and even literally incorporate, the above mentioned characteristics of this community, we submit the North Corktown Farmers Market.
