Detroit Still Works
How (and why) Bryan Boyer left Brooklyn and found life (and work) in the Motor City
Detroit has been through… a lot. But it is also a real place, with a powerful brand.
It’s Motown. The Motor City. The Comeback City.
It’s a profoundly American city as well as a world city, while being a unique singular place. And it’s where Bryan Boyer moved. An urban thinker and strategist, Brian and his wife left Brooklyn and searched the country for a new place to live.
Bryan Boyer, cofounder of the architecture and strategic design studio Dash Marshall
And they chose Detroit.
Boyer is a cofounder of Dash Marshall, a multi-disciplinary design studio that believes architecture and interiors, buildings, and cities can be better. He is also the founding director of the Urban Technology program at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.
He has helped develop coworking spaces in Brooklyn and spent time in Finland working at the Helsinki Design Lab. In other words, he’s spent a lot of time thinking about how we live and work. In Detroit, Boyer found a city that had a lot of history but was also in the process of deep renewal on multiple levels.
Mostly, he found a place to live. And unlike the narrative that permeates parts of the media, he found a livable city … with a future.
We recently spoke to Bryan about the thinking that went into his move, about Detroit’s past and present, about why people end up where they do, about the idea and the character of Detroit and its strong sense of self, and about our evolving relationship with place and where we choose to live and work.
Not every city offers an affordable Mies van der Rohe housing complex like the one Bryan found in Detroit. But then again, not every city is Detroit Rock City. And Bryan’s story teaches us that nomads, freelancers and remote workers might be surprised by what you find no matter where they choose to live.
