Incubation is alive and well in Detroit.  On a recent short trip, Joseph Grima, Director of Ideas City and I visited a number of cultural activists to plan for the November 2015 IDEAS CITY: Detroit Festival. Founded by the New Museum in 2011, IDEAS CITY explores the future of cities around the globe with the belief that arts and culture are important agents of change and are essential to the vitality of urban centers. This is made abundantly clear through the work being done by the artists and activists that we met with in Detroit. Methodologies, concerns, and results vary, but one trait they all share in common is the spirit of experimentation. Oakland Avenue Artist Coalition space. One of our first stops was the Oakland Avenue Artist Coalition headquarters on Oakland Avenue. In a nondescript warehouse formerly an automotive workshop — we encountered organized chaos.  It’s a space for computer trash that will be recycled, for welding sculptures, for artists to develop work or make exhibitions, or for plotting the next mural that will be painted on this once storied boulevard. Further north, we visited an artist’s collective space fronted by the group Complex Movements.  They have studio offices for makers, a workshop area to work out their multilayered visual and sonic installations, and around the corner there are facilities for silk screening, while other artists are prototyping wax, resin and plastic forms.  It’s a post grad environment where everyone is up for collaboration. Complex Movements studios. Nearby in the neighborhood north of Hamtramck, we visit Power House Productions. Over a decade, there has been both a deliberate and organic process to transform a number of dilapidated houses to serve a key function—sound, play, squash, and more.  It is the opposite of flex space, functioning as a community experiment that has it challenges, but must be commended for taking a risk to re-stitch a community through these domestic hubs. We were fortunate spend time with colleagues who have all been part of a longtime grassroots movement of cultural citizens who, day by day, lot by lot, make Detroit a vibrant cultural incubator that ever city can learn from. The Play House at Power House Productions—a rehearsal, performance, and event space. Also pictured is Joseph Grima, IDEAS CITY Director.