Can Detroit Become the Turin of the U.S.?
After touring Detroit last week, Valentino Castellani said he saw reflections of his own hometown 15 years ago. Detroit today reminds the ex-mayor of Turin of his city during the ’90s. The northern Italian town of about 900,000, much like Detroit, was a one-industry town. It was FIAT’s automobiles that kept the city going and put it on the map. But, like steel in Youngstown, Ohio, the mines in the Ruhr Valley of Germany and cars right here in Detroit, FIAT started to flounder. Production dwindled, jobs disappeared and money was tight. And then, under Castellani’s leadership, the city changed. How’d he do it? “You can’t teach change. You can only tell your story and let people pick up what is important for them, for their city,” he said last week to a room full of leaders, doers, thinkers and curious residents from Detroit, Cleveland and Pittsburgh, all places trying to turn around much the way Turin has. The seminar, held Friday in a conference room at the headquarters of NextEnergy in
