There is simply no shortage of death declarations when it comes to Detroit – in fact, there seems to be almost a business around it. You've probably seen what I'm talking about: the headline on the latest article or blog post declaring Detroit to be either dead or in the process of dying. During the auto crisis last year, every media organisation from Time to major blogs and documentaries (Requiem for Detroit?, a documentary about the decline of the city, was recently aired in the UK to great critical acclaim). Countless others articles, TV shows and blog entries have been detailing exactly how Detroit is dying and why we shouldn't care.

The belief (or perhaps the hope?) that Detroit is well on it's way to extinction is not new. Even people on the other side of the state have little use for Detroit, as KellenUSA informed us with her comment in the thread following my piece about worker solidarity in Michigan:

Please don't think that the Detroit Metro area represents all of the great state of Michigan. Those of us in the western part of the state know better. Michigan is a state that is as nearly as large as some European countries, we make no claim to that part of the state … The left-led government of Detroit has made it a failed city. They have nobody to blame but themselves.

Nobody I know in Detroit is happy about such headlines. I mentioned Requiem for Detroit? to several different groups of people I work, organise and am friends with, and got universal disgust. But the thing is, most of the news stories about Detroit struggling aren't wrong. Things are bad in Detroit. Schools are being shut down left and right. Corrupt city officials have been charged with everything from stealing money from school lunches to bribery. And, of course, all the jobs are gone. So if all the facts are true, if Detroit really is struggling under the weight of such economic devastation, why on earth are Detroiters mad at the negative international attention?

The answer is complicated. Contrary to popular belief, there is no shortage of organising for change in Detroit. Even Requiem recognised this by pointing to the urban gardening system that Detroit is growing famous for. These gardens came about as a community-driven response to the lack of grocery stores in Detroit (there is not one major grocery chain, although a regional grocery chain recently announced that it would begin construction soon) and an overwhelming number of burned-out, abandoned lots in the city. After the city refused to clean up or maintain them, local people took them over and built garden plots on them.

More and more, however, these garden systems are no longer being built by local community members out of necessity, but by middle-class white folks that are actively gentrifying the city, going on record claiming not to understand why their working-class black neighbours aren't helping. What started as a community-driven response to a very basic need is fast becoming an ideology that is in many places being imposed on a city population that just doesn't have the time or resources to help implement it. Sure, gardens may look nice and bring a neighbourhood together – they may even feed people. But do they pay the bills?

Similarly, the barter economy speaks of a daily problem for many small businesses in Detroit. Businesses have had no choice but to create barter arrangements. I work at a small community-driven acupuncture clinic that offers affordable treatments in an attempt to specifically reach working-class communities. For a huge portion of people in Detroit, this clinic is their only source of healthcare services, since they have no insurance and cannot afford the fees of a doctor's office. What started out as a paying job for me soon had to transition to a services barter – I help around the clinic and with media promotion, and the owner gives me free acupuncture.

How do other businesses fare? It's a question even the gardening system has to reckon with. More of the working-class community could work the gardens if they were paid in cash, but the gardens work through barter: you contribute labour, we give you food.

What does a small-business owner do when 40% of the working-class people surrounding her business are out of work? How does the owner pay back the loans given by the government to start a small business? And what about school loans, or rent? These are the questions Detroiters are struggling to answer daily. They focus on the "right" problems – ones that can ultimately lead to very productive answers. Unfortunately, those questions are patently ignored by media in favour of the more glamorous story of death and destruction.

What Detroiters do not need is yet another story about how their city is dying – or even another story declaring there may be hope after all. What they need is what every community needs: resources, support and the space to work through their problems in their own way. They need you to spread the word about the Detroit-based Allied Media Conference and the United States Social Forum. They need you to understand that what is wrong with Detroit is an indicator of industrialisation and capitalism, not a "liberal government" or gangs.

But more than anything else, Detroiters need and deserve a new type of headline.