Detroit:
On a list of Detroit's biggest problems, the lack of a statue honoring RoboCop would seem to rank rather low.
Yet in a city where some of the most prominent buildings have sat vacant for decades and booting a scandal-plagued mayor out of office took eight months, raising $50,000 to produce and install a 7-foot-tall iron replica of the crime-fighting cyborg was accomplished in a mere six days.
More than 1,600 people agreed to chip in an average of $17 through a Web site, DetroitNeedsRoboCop.com, and half of the target amount was contributed by a San Francisco company that specializes in turning fake consumer products from movies and television shows into reality. Not coincidentally, the company, Omni Consumer Products, shares its name with the villainous conglomerate that tried to turn a dystopian Detroit into Delta City in the 1987 science-fiction film.
The campaign's organizers intend to put the statue on land owned by the Imagination Station, a nonprofit group whose interests include public art, near the derelict Michigan Central train station. They are exploring other sites if the city agrees to sign on.
The unusual fund-raising effort sprang from a question posed to Detroit's mayor on Twitter last week by "a random dude in Massachusetts," who proposed that the city celebrate "RoboCop" the same way Philadelphia does "Rocky," according to the project's Web site. The first-term mayor, Dave Bing, replied: "There are not any plans to erect a statue to RoboCop. Thank you for the suggestion."
Jerry Paffendorf, who helped organize the campaign, acknowledges that RoboCop will not revive Detroit. But he hopes the project will not only create a tourist attraction, but also show that "crowd funding" can make a difference in a city where so much needs to be done. Additional money collected through March 26, when fund-raising is scheduled to end, could go toward other -- perhaps more important -- projects, he said.
"Sometimes it takes a RoboCop to show a different way to do things," said Mr. Paffendorf, a 29-year-old Internet entrepreneur. "My hope is that it sets an example and puts this kind of funding on the map, so when people see big problems, they can think, 'If crazy people raised $50,000 for a RoboCop statue, we can certainly raise more to take on something bigger.' "
The project's merits have been debated on numerous local blogs and radio programs, and the effort has been criticized as wasting money and glorifying the fact that Detroit has long been Hollywood's default example of urban decay. "This is what happens when irony runs amok," read a headline on the Web site of Crain's Detroit Business on Wednesday.
But the RoboCop campaign has succeeded where others in Detroit have not. In 2009, the city tore down Tiger Stadium after a nonprofit group was unable to raise the $12 million needed to preserve even a portion of the abandoned but much-loved ballpark. And the singer Martha Reeves, who served four years on the City Council, failed in her effort to put up statues of Motown stars around town.