Don’t go see Detropia hoping for ruin porn. The new film by acclaimed documentary filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (Boys of Baraka, Jesus Camp) gives you more than pretty pictures of abandoned buildings: It gives you the story of the people who live among them.

In one of the first scenes of the film, we meet Crystal Starr, a Detroit videoblogger who trolls these buildings for fun. “What was there? Who was there?” she asks while exploring an old apartment building. “I’m picturing this place clean, and people walking around, and shit happening.” She stops in front of an open window in an apartment kitchen. “Can you imagine having breakfast right here? You know what I mean, like, look at your view.” The Detroit skyline looms in the distance, over a swath of overgrown greenery. “Like ‘Yeah, I’m gonna go out and conquer the world, ’cause I can damn near see it right here.’”

“Our aesthetic approach was definitely Detroit as dreamscape,” Ewing says. “You can drive for several miles and really not see anyone — and it’s not because there’s no one there, it’s because you have 139 square miles with only 700,000 people living there.”

What makes the dreamscape of Detropia so powerful is the fact that it’s rooted in reality. Throughout the film (whose name is a mashup of “Detroit” and “dystopia”), the directors drop a succession of shocking facts: Every 20 minutes, another family moves out of Detroit. In 1930, Detroit was the fastest growing city in America; it is now the fastest shrinking. In the last 10 years, Michigan has lost 50 percent of all its manufacturing jobs. The geographic areas of Boston, San Francisco, and Manhattan can fit within the city limits of Detroit, yet the city itself has fewer people than Fort Worth, Texas.

Ewing and Grady don’t generalize in this film, and, refreshingly, they don’t offer any silver-bullet solutions or tidy endings. Rather, they manage to tell the story of a city through three artfully chosen main characters: Starr, the videoblogger; George MacGregor, a veteran union organizer; and Tommy Stevens, a retired schoolteacher who owns and operates a bar, the Raven Lounge.

With boisterous crowds and sweaty live music, the Raven Lounge acts as the setting for many of the film’s happier scenes, and yet it, too, hints at tragedy. Located across the street from the old Chevrolet plant, much of its success hinged on that of the car companies, and Stevens still holds out hope that energy-efficient cars like the Chevy Volt will bring in enough customers for him to hire more staff (in the film, he cooks all the food himself).

One of the most provocative and heartbreaking moments in Detropia is when Stevens, visiting the North American International Auto Show at Detroit’s convention center with his wife, realizes that China’s electric car, manufactured by BYD, gets more mileage per charge and costs thousands of dollars less than the Volt. “This is still a town where we all think that we’re one excellent car away from a comeback,” Ewing says. “And the numbers just don’t add up.”

The filmmakers avoided the “low-hanging fruit,” Ewing says — the ubiquitous shots of urban chaos that would have eliminated the thin, yet ever-present, line of hope that threads through the film. “There are no homeless people in the film. There are no drug addicts in the film, there are no tent cities in the film; there are no people shooting up or sleeping under trees and trash, which you see all the time in Detroit.”

But nor do they hang their hope on the influx of young (predominantly white, predominantly privileged) artists who have occasionally been unjustly credited as saviors of the city. All three of Detropia’s characters are middle-class, employed African Americans. The artists who get the most screen time are the film’s poster couple: Steve and Dorota Coy, whose noble performance art critiques capitalism and corporate America.

And while Ewing and Grady hint at the possibility of a revival driven by new arrivals (young, white artist buys a loft, comments on how affordable everything in Detroit is as his chrome kitchen appliances gleam in the background), they don’t make any promises, and Ewing recognizes the problems with this narrative. “It’s too early to tell if they’re going to stay,” she says. “The film is so much more about the consequences of short-term thinking on behalf of our industries, our leaders. To throw it all in the hands of these newcomers and hint that that’s absolutely going to be the comeback — that felt too simplistic.”

So who will save the city, then? Ewing points to small businesses. “Dependence on a major corporation, the belief that the corporation is going to take care of a city or a huge amount of people — we have to let go of that idea,” Ewing says. “I think entrepreneurship, small businesses, are the only way.”

Detropia’s message echoes beyond the Motor City, and Ewing hopes Americans across the country can learn from it. “A DIY attitude is crucial. A sense of getting involved in one’s community and not standing on the sidelines is essential,” she says. “Pay attention to our trade policies. Vote with knowledge.”

Detropia premiered at Sundance in January, where it earned the festival’s award for best editing. The film, which Ewing and Grady chose to self-distribute in order to guarantee pre-election screen time, is currently playing in Detroit, New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Boston, Providence, and San Francisco, and will open in other cities this month. To find a screening near you, visit detropiathefilm.com.

Of everyone I saw in all the New York City parks I visited this weekend — the cool kids eating organic popsicles on the High Line, the svelte ladies jogging the Central Park Reservoir, the older man in a Speedo sunning himself on Hudson River Park lawn — one couple made me question my idea of what parks are and how they should be within a city.

They were at the top of a small set of white marble stairs, perched on a bench by a fountain in a tiny park on 58th Street, between 5th and 6th avenues in Manhattan, so tucked away from the bustle they (and the park) likely went largely unnoticed by busy passersby.

I’d just fought a throng of tourists for park bench space in Central Park, and it struck me, watching this couple, that parks don’t need to be grand, historic, hundred-acre, designed spaces. They can be tiny pockets, like this one, squeezed in wherever there’s room. And they can be part of the connective tissue that holds a city together – like the High Line, or Hudson River Park, which serve as both destinations and means for getting from one place to another.

Helle Søholt, co-founding partner and managing director of Gehl Architects in Copenhagen, Denmark, was able to articulate this idea more clearly at the keynote panel discussion of the Greater and Greener International Urban Parks Conference, which I’d come to New York to attend. “Parks in the U.S. are seen as destinations,” she said. “In Europe, they’re thought of more as public spaces between buildings — the green glue that holds a city together.”

Copenhagen, being the Portlandia of Europe, has a plethora of green glue, due in large part to the labyrinth of bike lanes that wind through the city (to take a whopping 37 percent of Copenhagenites to work). The city just opened its first “bicycle superhighway” — which is less a freeway than a bicycle-only, tree-lined path that meanders through the city and its surrounding countryside. It is the first of 26 planned routes.

But America’s not so far behind — New York least of all. Launched in 1996, the Greenstreets program has transformed much of the city’s negative space into green space. Greenstreets started small — planting a flowerbed here, a few trees there — and gradually began improving existing infrastructure, like awkward intersections. What once was a concrete median or a matrix of painted lines, for instance, became a raised bed with shrubbery, sidewalks, and crosswalks — even a bench or two.

From there, it grew. Now, Times Square and Madison Square, historically two of the busiest intersections in New York, are pedestrian paradises — with potted plants, wider sidewalks, and café tables (just like in Europe!).

“One of the reasons this has been happening in New York for a lot longer than the rest of America is we don’t have the luxury of space that a lot of other places do,” says Nette Compton, director of green infrastructure for the New York City Parks Department.

Of course, New York isn’t the only American city thinking outside the parks. Minneapolis’s Grand Rounds Scenic Byway has 52 miles of roads, bike paths, and walkways that link downtown’s riverfront and the city’s surrounding parks and lakes. Houston’s Buffalo Bayou, an interconnected series of parks and bike paths, aims to preserve the ecosystem of the waterway and reinvigorate existing brownfield sites and unused freeway corridors.

The idea of a linked park system is not new, mind you. Frederick Law Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace in Boston (one of the man’s many linear park systems) connects 1600s-era Boston Common to Franklin Park in a nearly eight-mile series of greenways that includes the formal promenade of Commonwealth Avenue.

But the Big Apple is taking an especially holistic approach. Greenstreets is now a centerpiece of the city’s effort to enhance inter-departmental collaboration — part of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s three-pronged approach to maintaining and enhancing city parks. The program brings together New York’s Department of Parks and Recreation with the departments of Transportation and Environmental Protection.

A successful Greenstreet is what Compton likes to call “hyperfunctional” — wider sidewalks mean a more pedestrian-friendly environment, and directing storm water onto planted beds controls runoff and provides needed water to those plants (which otherwise would have to depend on periodic visits from guys with hoses on trucks).

“It’s all about efficiency,” says Compton. “And New Yorkers — we’re all about efficiency.”

Garry Golden, a futurist who studies issues that will affect transportation and business in the 21st century, imagines that the future of urban parks will look a lot like Greenstreets, with parks woven throughout the rest of the city’s infrastructure. “What’s the future of potential park real estate? What are the new parts of the city that you might take control of?” he asks. “Parking spots.”

Ten to 20 years from now, he predicts, cars will be replaced by better public transportation, including self-propelled, on-demand, pod-like cars. (Remember Minority Report? Like that, only real.) This means streets will no longer be lined with cars. “The next step is you see building- and homeowners saying, if we don’t need as many parking spaces, let’s transform that piece of the urban landscape into something that’s urban and green” — i.e., more bike lanes, and Park(ing) Day-like parklets.

It occurred to me, after around 48 hours in New York this weekend, that I had visited more than six bona-fide parks. A run in Central Park, then a walk through Washington Square Park on the way from the subway to the conference, a quick walk with a friend on the High Line, then, when we realized the High Line doesn’t allow dogs, a few blocks over to Hudson River Park. Later, I stopped in Madison Square Park to use the public wi-fi — an easier (and cheaper) option than Starbucks when I needed to write some quick emails.

It was seamless, this park-hopping — a testament, in part, to Mayor Bloomberg’s goal to have every New Yorker live within a 10-minute walk of a park. But soon, it seems, that goal will be outdated. The walk itself may well appease our nature-loving psyches. And as the rest of urban America (and the world) continues to run out of space, there’s reason to believe we’ll take a cue from New York, and start filling in the cracks with green space. Not only will it make our walks prettier, but, like Greenstreets, it just might make the city more efficient. That’s what happens, after all, when you make a little room for nature in the concrete jungle.

We join together with our fellow humans for the sake of saving a buck all the time. That’s why public transportation exists — it’s cheaper for 20 people to get on one bus than it is for 20 people to drive their own cars. (Oh right, and buses are also super cool.) Or think of roommates — sure, they never wash their dishes, but living with them saves us hundreds of dollars in rent.

Groundswell, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., wants to add clean electricity to the list of things that are better off shared.

Groundswell was founded by three guys who worked on President Obama’s campaign in 2008. “They had really seen the impact of community organizing in a political space,” says Elizabeth Lindsey, the group’s managing director. “And after the campaign, they were really interested in seeing how you could take that model and make a tangible difference outside the political sphere.”

To do this, Groundswell helps communities leverage their collective purchasing power to win the best possible deals on clean energy. They bring together nonprofits, community groups, churches, or individuals to make bulk purchases of wind-powered electricity, for example, or energy efficiency upgrades on homes and buildings. Buying as a group allows them to negotiate lower prices, and could potentially make this type of service available in areas where individuals and solitary community groups cannot afford it alone.

Reverend Tom Knoll of First Trinity Lutheran Church says his congregation saved $6,000 in a year by partnering with other Washington, D.C., churches to buy wind power. The church plowed the savings into charitable programs such as a food pantry, low-income housing, and job training programs. An added bonus was getting to know other churches, he says: “We don’t normally talk to one another, even though we may all be Christian.”

Lindsey, who worked in green workforce development before joining Groundswell, was attracted by the organization’s emphasis on job creation. “There were often government programs or nonprofit programs that were paying for training programs, but there weren’t necessarily jobs available for these individuals once the training had occurred,” she says. “When I first heard about Groundswell, I was really impressed by the fact that they were looking at the other side of the equation — not just, like, ‘We need to train people,’ but ‘How can we actually build a clean economy where jobs are actually created?’”

Lindsey also notes that together, groups can make demands that align with their values — like insisting on only working with contractors who provide health care for their employees or hire local residents or unemployed workers. “Because these groups are working together, they’re able to build in different social outcomes that they’d like to see,” she says.

But bringing clean energy to poor communities has been a challenge for the group. Although Groundswell does work in some underserved communities in D.C. and Maryland, even buying in bulk, costs can be prohibitive. “It’s expensive to get your home weatherized, and quite honestly, a lot of low-income communities can’t afford it,” Lindsey says.

Still, over time, Groundswell’s model of empowering communities may provide the missing link in the clean economy: consumer demand. Like the organization’s name, Lindsey says, “it’s a wave that builds over time. If you have one person, it’s great. But if you have five people, 10 people — we’re really building these powerful groups of consumers together.”

Name one landscape architect. Any one will do. No, I’m not talking about the guy who does your landscaping — I’m looking for genuine, bona fide landscape architects, the ones who analyze, plan, design, manage, and nurture natural and built environments.

What was that? “Frederick Law Olmsted?” You mean the grandfather of landscape architecture, the man who built Central Park? Good. Now name a landscape architect who hasn’t been dead for more than a hundred years.

Hello? Can you tell me who designed the High Line, the most famous urban park in the country right now? You can’t. That’s what I thought. Well, for future reference, it’s this guy, James Corner — but that, right there, is my point:

The present generation of landscape architects is doing truly groundbreaking work, building parks like the High Line in places nobody expects them. If Olmsted is a classical composer of yore, James Corner and his contemporaries are like Lady Gaga. They’re like Bob Dylan plugging in. They’re the electric guitar after years and years of classical music. BUT YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF THESE PEOPLE!

And so, on Olmsted’s 190^th birthday (April 26 — prepare your celebratory picnic baskets!), I decided it’s time to show these landscape architects a little love.

But first, allow me to geek out about Olmsted for a quick sec. I can’t help it. I wrote and produced a documentary film about the guy. Plus, to understand the revolutionaries working today, you have to understand where they came from.

Central Park, New York City. (Photo by asterix611.)

People still, after all these years, love Olmsted’s parks. Just check out Central Park on a sunny day. Or Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Or the Emerald Necklace that winds through the neighborhoods of Boston. Or the park systems in Louisville and Buffalo. The man carried out over 500 commissions to design urban parks, parkways, park systems, residential communities, college campuses, government buildings, and country estates. His sons, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and John Charles Olmsted (who was technically Olmsted’s nephew — it’s a long story) designed thousands more, including major city plans for Baltimore and Seattle.

Olmsted landscapes are practically trademarked — rolling hills, open meadows, patches of thick woodlands, wide, winding paths. Olmsted didn’t want you to notice the design — and, unless you’re looking for it, you don’t. The man even hated flowers because they call too much attention to themselves. You’re supposed to lose yourself in Olmsted’s parks — the paths were designed so that you’d never come upon a right angle and have to ask yourself, “Which way?”

The High Line, New York City. (Photo by David Berkowitz.)

Turns out that tired, overworked city dwellers really appreciated this — which is why it’s still hard to find a blanket spot in Sheep Meadow on a Sunday in June. But for all the reverence Olmsted still earns from the public, he set the bar so high that many landscape architects resent him. In an interview filmed for the documentary, urban studies expert Witold Rybczynski told us:

It’s a little bit like being a composer right after Mozart or Beethoven. People just want more Mozart or Beethoven. They’re not interested in Joe Smith — you know, they’ve been exposed to something, and they just want more of it … I mean he’s bigger than Mozart, because he doesn’t just do great parks, he also sort of invents the whole profession. It’s as if Mozart invented musical composing, which of course he didn’t.

In a literal sense, landscape architects today can’t live up to Olmsted’s legacy. There just isn’t enough space. When Olmsted and Calvert Vaux built 843-acre Central Park, which starts on 59^th Street, they built it on farmland. At the time, Manhattan’s development stopped at 23^rd Street. Today, we’re building parks on abandoned, elevated railroad tracks and old brownfield sites, and we have to do more with less — the majority of urban parks built in the last decade are fewer than 15 acres.

But today’s urban parks are changing the way people interact with cities, just as Olmsted’s were.

Citygarden, St. Louis. (Photo by dishfunctional.)

Nobody looks at Citygarden in St. Louis — equal parts sculpture garden, botanic garden, and city park — and comments on how natural it is. Designed by Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects, based in Charlottesville, Va., Citygarden pays homage to the cultural and natural histories of the city in its own way. The 550-foot long arching wall made of locally quarried rock may have been too conspicuous for Olmsted, but it echoes the bends and bluffs of both the Mississippi River and the city’s famed Gateway Arch.

Civic Space Park in Phoenix, designed by a team at the Fortune-500 design firm AECOM, has a splash pad and a field of LED-lit columns which come alive nightly in a light show meant to mimic the lightening of an Arizona summer. The park also has a crazy wormhole sculpture suspended in air called Her Secret is Patience. It was designed and built by Janet Echelman of painted, galvanized steel and cables, polyester twine netting, and changing, computer-controlled colored lights. It is meant to make the patterns of the desert winds visible to the human eye.

Civic Space Park, Phoenix. (Photo by RightBrainPhotography.)

The new design for Chicago’s Navy Pier — another project of James Corner Field Operations — has an indoor “crystal garden” with hanging “vegetable pods” straight out of Avatar. The pier, originally designed by Daniel Burnham in 1909, was meant to connect the citizens of Chicago with Lake Michigan. Corner’s floating pool at the end of the pier will do this quite literally.

And suddenly, urban parks are cool again, and not in the way they’ve always been (It’s springtime, let’s have lunch in the park!) but in a way that makes the act of actually designing them look really impressive and hip.

But the more this new guard of landscape architects tries to distance themselves from Olmsted, the more, in the end, they resemble him.

The thing is, Olmsted was creating landscapes in the 19^th century, but his work is as relevant today as it ever was. That’s what made him so visionary: He was an innovator who looked ahead. Here’s the future he saw for New York in 1859:

The time will come when New York will be built up, when all the grading and filling will be done, and when the picturesquely-varied, rocky formations of the Island will have been converted into foundations for rows of monotonous straight streets, and piles of erect, angular buildings. There will be no suggestion left of its present varied surface, with the single exception of the Park.

Eschleman’s sculpture in Civic Space Park may not be floating in all its Technicolor glory in the year 2170. But the resourcefulness that today’s crop of landscape architects has inspired will be indispensable in the future, as the amount of open space in cities continues to decline. Then, all the landscape architects will be complaining about James Corner.