PASSAGE TWO (1)Everyone loves an underdog. The news of Detroit's bankruptcy on July 18th, the largest ever filed by an American city, made headlines everywhere. The story is one that people have been following intently for over half a century. Motown, America's darling industrial conurbation, symbol of the automobile, the wealthy workingman, and all that seemed right with America, suffered a vicious decline. From a population of 1. 8m in the early 1950s, only 700, 000 inhabitants remain today. Its narrative is one of grandiose rise and fall, characteristic of a larger trend among the so-called Rust Belt cities. To pessimists, it is another sign of the decline of America itself. (2)Yet because of all this, Detroit has captivated the imagination. American car lovers think longingly about the heyday of Detroit car manufacturing, clinging to their '57 Chevys and all they represent. Urban economic geographers and planners study the city's demise and speculate about what went wrong. Artists flock to the city to photograph a deteriorating human-built landscape, an increasingly popular form dubbed"ruin porn". Meanwhile, the Detroit diaspora( 大移居 )lies not only in the upper middle-class suburbs of adjacent Oakland County but across the North American continent. Few have forgotten their roots. (3)It is easy to dismiss this love of Detroit as romanticised and far removed from the city's current difficulties. But it is being channelled. In recent years, civic crowd-funding has developed to allow ordinary citizens to direct their money to local civic projects. Platforms such as Citizinvestor, neighbor. ly and Spacehive were designed specifically for such initiatives, complementing more general crowd-funding sites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo. These have funded civic works around the world, including a community centre in Glyncoch in Wales, a free Wi-Fi network in downtown Mansfield, a former mining town in Nottinghamshire, a pedestrian bridge in Rotterdam and a bike share programme in Kansas City. (4)Two years ago, Detroit mayor Dave Bing snubbed a Kickstarter project to build a Robocop statue and place it in downtown Detroit, despite the fact that its$50, 000 funding target had been easily reached. Perhaps this was too quick a response. While one might debate the pros and cons of a statue commemorating a 1980s action hero, the idea of harnessing civic crowd-funding to benefit Detroit is very compelling, Imagine a crowd-funded downtown training centre helping get youths out of gangs and into employment, a programme to provide laptops to inner city schools, or even a renovation of Michigan Central Station. And part of the attractiveness of the idea is that anyone can donate:new residents, old residents, or people around the world that have simply fallen in love with the city's story. (5)Though there are many hurdles to overcome, what civic crowd-funding represents is potential salvation for even the most-fiscally frail urban areas. Hollywood has shown us that the beloved underdog is not always victorious in the end. What always transpires, however, is a valiant llth hour attempt at overcoming all odds. Detroit may wish to give it a try.