DETROIT — The latest must-go event in this gritty, left-behind city — where D.J.’s flourish among ruins, trespassing in tumbledown buildings is part of a night out, and even garage rock is bare-bones — centers on soup.

Soup, as it’s known, is a monthly gathering, held above the MexicanTown Bakery in southwestern Detroit, where guests pay $5 for a homemade bowlful, salad (locally grown, to be sure) and dessert, and sit at tables made of doors laid over milk crates, listening as compatriots propose projects. Creating a pocket park, organizing an artists directory and devising a surveillance-camera video montage were all on this month’s agenda. The guests vote, and the idea deemed most deserving gets the Soup dollars — a neat little way to wiki-finance creativity. Soup, which started seven months ago, has been growing steadily. The last one, on Sunday, was the largest yet.

“It was so big that we were running around collecting doors” before the meal, Kate Daughdrill, a founder, said. Ms. Daughdrill, 25, an artist, graduate student and waitress, built the voting booth for Soup; she and her co-founder, Jessica Hernandez, whose family owns the bakery, hope to make the loft where it’s held into a permanent creative space. Building a community around Soup, Ms. Daughdrill said, is “part of my art.”

Detroit is plagued by all the urban problems that make it fodder for big-picture editorializing and cop shows. Its long-dwindling population and landscape of abandoned buildings have made it a singular — or perhaps prophetic — case study in Rust Belt decline. But its particular brand of civic and economic decay has also drawn something unexpected: a small but well-publicized movement of artists and other creative types trying to wring something out of the rubble.