“We’re lifelong, seventh-generation Detroiters. We came to retail from an unexpected direction, as a way to combine our seemingly disparate backgrounds in urban planning and fine art, our mutual love for design, and our desire to contribute to the vitality of our city and neighborhood,” said Andy Linn.

After graduating from Princeton, Mark Wallace moved to Detroit, where he briefly worked as a teacher. Deciding that he needed to make a career change, he went back to grad school at U-M to “reassess” how to be useful. “It had always been a priority of mine to do something to make life better for those kids and the families who live here.”

Wayne S. Brown hears and feels Detroit like a musical composition, a songbook that tells his life story and that of the city through its crescendos and decrescendos, its mournful lamentations to its soaring arias. Brown, a University of Michigan alum who serves as president and CEO of Michigan Opera Theatre, knows Detroit as the place that enriched his childhood, gave him his love of performing music and his first job opportunity with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. It now serves as his inspiration to bring opera off of the stage and out into a community ready to embrace it.

For the last 10 years, Steve Tobocman has been at the center of efforts to bolster Metro Detroit’s immigrant communities and their contribution to the region’s economy. Since 2009, the University of Michigan alum has led Global Detroit, a non-profit dedicated to making the area welcoming to immigrants, attracting and retaining talent, revitalizing neighborhoods, and attracting business development.

The University of Michigan has inducted two new members to its Detroiter Hall of Fame — Cynthia Stephens and Charles Adams — and also recognized Dexter Mason as an emerging leader in the city plus honored Barbara Israel as a faculty member who has shown outstanding service to the community.

Ahmina Maxey was shocked when the incinerator closed in late March. “It was so abrupt,” she said. “The incinerator (owner) has the best poker face I’ve ever seen because… they were pretending it was going to be open for 20 more years.”

Selden Standard is known for its sleek interior, its celebrity chef Andy Hollyday and the beautiful food served within its sleek walls on Second Avenue in Detroit. Let’s just say that its Roasted Cauliflower and Charred Octopus have earned rave reviews from foodies locally and around the nation.

Informal urbanism – generally characterized by unregulated or Illegal economic and social interaction driven by marginalized populations – has long been seen as a distinguishing feature of day-to-day life in burgeoning cities in the global South.

Lessons learned earning two University of Michigan degrees guided Rick Haas on a globetrotting career that took him to Japan, Brazil, India and back to his hometown – Detroit – where his team at Mahindra Automotive is succeeding on an unconventional path in the U.S. auto industry.