You’ve read the headlines. You’ve seen the pictures. Detroit is dead. Decaying from the inside. The murder capital of the world. America’s forgotten city, slid into a “post-apocalyptic collapse,” waiting for some imminent demise that hasn’t quite happened yet.

Detroit has become the TV news cycle’s poster child for the country’s decline. But the headlines are written by people who haven’t come within a 50 mile radius of the city, who think one radio crime story makes them an expert. Inside the city limits, Detroiters are making new meaning of their city for themselves.

The word reclaim is defined a few ways.

“to bring (uncultivated areas or wasteland) into a condition for cultivation or other use.”

“to recover (substances) in a pure or usable form from refuse, discarded articles, etc.”

“to bring back to a preferable manner of living, sound principles, ideas, etc.”

It’s usually used to describe fighting back overgrown vegetation to reclaim the usefulness of a space, but the idea of “reclamation” sings equally true for this city. In the case of Detroit, artists throughout the city have begun to reclaim empty lots, homes, and even entire neighborhoods, proving that even though they’ve been abandoned by their government and the media machine, they have not been abandoned by their people. A kind of “cultural overgrowth” not terribly unlike the natural one that precedes it.

What grows in spaces that others no longer care to look? What cracks through the concrete in the dark corners of our industrial past? The unkillable and unending human spirit, challenging popular notions of “art” along the way.