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Changing Gears will present its first one-hour documentary, Reinventing Our Cities, next Thursday, Dec. 16. The special will run at 2 PM Eastern, 1 PM Central on our partner stations — WBEZ Chicago, Michigan Radio and ideastream in Cleveland.

We’ll spend the hour visiting cities across the region, talking to experts, and talking to you.

Throughout the hour, we’ll be featuring thoughts and ideas from our listeners on making our Great Lakes cities better.

Here’s how you can be a part of the broadcast. Call 1-888-YOUR-NPR (1-888-968-7677) or fill out the form below if you are willing to be interviewed on the air.

We’ll give you more details about the special over the next few days. There also will be a live chat here at ChangingGears.info.

Please join us for Reinventing Our Cities.

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CHICAGO – Cities across the Midwest are full of immigrant stories. Previous generations filled the factories, building cars, furniture and steel. Now that those jobs are disappearing, cities like Detroit, Cleveland and Pittsburgh are hoping another wave of immigrants will help reinvigorate the economy. Changing Gears is a new public media project looking at the reinvention of the industrial Midwest. In this story, we look at the role immigrant entrepreneurs are playing in our economy.

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On Chicago’s Southwest Side, the 26th Street corridor in Little Village is hopping. It’s Saturday morning, and the streets are full of families, wheeling carts and kids in strollers as they shop.

I’m standing outside the Little Village Chamber of Commerce with its new director, Nilda Esparza and its vice-chair, Robert Garza. They’re talking about how this area is the cultural and economic home to the city’s Mexican population.

Esparza says you’ll find anywhere from 500 to 600 businesses, just on this strip.

“Everything from A to Z,” adds Garza, himself an entrepreneur. “From grocery stores, travel agencies, just about anything, you can find here on 26th Street.”

Garza’s family came here from Mexico the 1940s. They opened one of the first grocery stores in the area. Now, it’s a bustling center of city commerce. Little Village has the largest concentration of Mexican-Americans in the Midwest.

“Little Village is a place where a lot of us have started, a lot of us have flourished,” says Jesus Davila, as he stands outside Davila’s Restaurant – just one of his four businesses. He says his two restaurants alone make at least a million and a half dollars in revenue a year. He also has another business that makes small parts, and a photo studio – even though they do more than just photos there.

“Here we also do income taxes, we help people with their immigration forms, and that keeps us going year round,” he says.

Three hundred miles to the east, Steve Tobocman looks at neighborhoods like Chicago’s Little Village and is not just envious – he’s trying to figure out how it can be replicated in Southeast Michigan.

“I think immigrants represent a tremendous potential,” he says.  “Already the role that they’re playing, for example here in Southeast Michigan, is that they are critical components of energy driving us to the new economy”.

Tobocman is in charge of the Global Detroit Initiative. He’s working with Pittsburgh and Cleveland to try to make all of their cities more welcoming to immigrants, because he sees these people as key to helping kickstart their economies.

He points to Hispanic and Arab communities that are repopulating parts of Detroit – creating rare economic bright spots.

Tobocman also likes to reel off figures like this one: In Michigan, almost 40 percent of the tech businesses started in the past decade were created by immigrants. This from a state where just five percent of its population was born outside the country.

One way Detroit is working with Cleveland and Pittsburgh is to create a regional center for a government visa program called the EB-5. That’s where would-be immigrants who are willing to invest a million dollars and create ten American jobs qualify for a green card  - for them and their families.

“I think being open to attracting the intellectual capital is going to be critical to the 21st Century,” he says.

Back in Chicago, a group of three dozen university computer science students are handing in a coding test. It’s an effort by the Illinois Technology Association to ensure that the next generation of entrepreneurs stays in the Midwest.

Terry Howerton is the head of the industry group. He looks at companies like Netscape, Paypal, Youtube and Oracle as the ones that got away.

“All of those people have one thing in common: an Illinois education,” he says. “And they have another thing in common: they slipped away from our community. They built their companies somewhere else. They created massive amounts of jobs, and massive amounts of wealth, somewhere else.

So for the first time this year, the tech group visited seven universities throughout Illinois. They fed computer students lots of pizza and gave them the first round of tests. The top 45 made it to Chicago – where they’ve sat another two hour exam. The winner gets $5,000. More importantly, there are recruiters from a dozen or so Illinios-based tech waiting outside the room to meet and interview the test-takers.

Most of the room is full of international students – mostly from China, and India, but also Eastern Europe. In the past five years, more of these students are going back to their home countries and starting businesses there.

But Howerton hopes finding them jobs in Illinois will make the students stay.

Vivek  Thyagarajan is a senior at the University of Illinois. He’s 22. He ticks off a few on his list of reasons why he wants to stay here instead of going home to India: American corporate culture here, American lifestyle, and American money.

He points out he’s not in a position to bargain for where he wants to go. He needs to go where the jobs are, because his employer will sponsor him. But all things being equal, he’ld love to move to Chicago.

He’s an electrical engineering student. And he points across the street to the Willis Tower as yet another reason for staying.

“I love the design,” he says. “I love the city because of the amazing architecture, this is where the skyscraper was born. So yeah, I’d love to stay here.”

Thyaragun’s goal is to have a job offer before May, when he’s set to graduate.

In Sunday’s New York Times Travel section, I write about Detroit’s Grand Circus Park. You can see some wonderful photos by Detroit-based photographer Fabrizio Costantini here.

Grand Circus Park is a good example of the revival that’s taking place in downtown Detroit, and stories we are telling at Changing Gears.

It has taken a few years for the area to come back to life, and there are still some empty storefronts, vacant lots and office buildings. But if you visit Detroit on a weekend when the Lions are playing at Ford Field, or on a night when the Red Wings have a game at Joe Louis Arena, the district around Grand Circus Park bubbles with activity.

While researching the story this summer, I got to visit a number of places that have come back to life. The most prominent is the Book Cadillac Hotel, a few blocks south of the park, which is now run by the Westin organization. For most of my adult life, the Book Cadillac stood vacant, though I have some very dim memories of going there with my parents when I was young.

The renovation, which was finished in November 2008, is stunning. All the beautiful historic features in the 86 year old have been restored, and the rooms are as modern as you would want a hotel to be, with marble trim in the bathrooms, leather furniture and those big puffy Westin beds. Here’s a tour of the hotel conducted when it reopened by WWJ Radio.

The Book Cadillac has become a place for film stars and crews to stay during movie shoots in Detroit. Demi Moore, Miley Cyrus and Sigourney Weaver stayed there this summer. Members of the Detroit Lions stay there before games, and members of Jay-Z’s entourage were there Labor Day weekend when he performed with Eminem at Comerica Park. The Book Cadillac also has luxury condos which have become home to many of the new executives now running General Motors.

The Book Cadillac houses Roast, which I call Detroit’s most talked-about restaurant in my Times story. Roast is the first restaurant outside Cleveland for Michael Symon, who appears on Iron Chef on the Food Network. (I’ve eaten at both his Cleveland restaurants, Lola and Lolita.)

It’s likely you’ll need to book a month ahead for a weekend reservation at Roast, and that the bar is often four deep with customers by 5 pm on a week night. The menu is heavy on meat, as you might expect, and it’s also pricey for a city that’s been hit by the recession. But there are specials, like the “beast of the day.” Roast is open only for dinner.

If you prefer casual dining, you might want to check out a brand-new restaurant, Rub BBQ. Many people in Detroit are partisans for Slows on Michigan Avenue, just west of downtown. (It was recently featured in the Times’ Dining section). But Rub, which faces Grand Circus Park, is leveraging its location and a menu that’s a little more mainstream than Slows. You can get sandwiches, ribs, appetizers and desserts, and the ball parks are just a few blocks away.

Do you have memories of the Book Cadillac? Where else are you eating these days in Detroit? Let us know.

Interesting contrast in City of Cleveland service workers. On GeorgeNemeth.com, the garbageman that left my can on purpose and the building inspector who came to look and the new furnace. I hope for the city’s sake there’s more of the latter than the former.

In Part I, I told you about the emergence of the first killer app of open fabrication (formerly known as open source digital fabrication).

In Part II, I showed you that it works.

Now, Part III – Cliché Time

The train has left the station. It’s Game On!

Though leaves are falling and that Arctic wind is close…things just get hotter and hotter…

Now, a mere three months removed from Part II, not only am I using my open source 3d printers to print 3d objects, I’m also manufacturing parts to improve these machines and I’m shipping these parts all over the world.

And, there is a good article (with a silly title) and accompanying video on the WSJ homepage today about the resurgence of Making. (If you watch the video intro carefully you’ll even see MakerGear whiz by) From first print to WSJ cameo in three months…it’s happening, happening fast and happening everywhere. Well, except for Cleveland…

Where have all the makers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the makers gone
Long time ago…

Maybe we can start to change this at Cleveland Startup Weekend. I have one more ticket to the event and I’d like to take a local maker. Let’s spark a local resurgence…tap into this wave of innovative energy…Surfs Up, Dude.

Let me know if you want to Hang Five at #SWCLE.

Press play to hear the Hawaii Five-0 theme.

Rick

Looking forward to Startup Weekend Cleveland Nov. 20-22. It is going to be a fun-can-do-action-packed event. Get your tixs: http://cleveland.startupweekend.org/tickets

Can’t make the whole event? Buy a Sunday Night Demo Ticket for only $20 and join us Sunday evening around 5pm for drinks and final presentations.

ThatGirl writes: “All your empty homes and broken dreams, annually reselling our souls and our firstborns to men in suits who suck us dry, and girls go missing but no one pays attention because they’re from “that side” of town. You get drunk and complain about your losing sports teams. You listen to the same old songs on WMMS or KISS FM…”

My sentiments exactly.

Read the letter @ Cleveland Love: open letter #5: Dear Cleveland.

“Shields imagines a day when the Botanical Garden and the city collaborate on an urban farm with a large-scale composting facility and an all-season greenhouse that operates with renewable energy.”

Growing more than food in inner city | GreenCityBlueLake

An email from Dan Hanson:

Friends,

I submitted a project to celebrate Cleveland’s diversity through art to a company that awards an annual grant.

We are one of 10 finalists. The winners are chosen by Internet voting. You can vote once each day at http://www.markhammarkofdistinction.com by selecting us (ClevelandPeople.Com) from the View and Vote for Finalist section and leaving your name and e-mail.

Please vote each day and spread the word to your lists to make this project happen in Cleveland. It will result in lots of work for local artists, ways to beautify the community and celebrate our cultures.

Thanks,
Dan

Please help out if you’re so inclined. I am.

“Ten Living Cities” Symposium & Arts Festival is looking for professional photographers to submit work showing why the “10 Fastest Dying Cities,” as selected by Forbes magazine in August 5, 2008 issue, are “10 Living Cities”.

via Photos — Ten Living Cities.