The Committee to Nuke Elysium

That is true on a stretch of Farnsworth Street that has been reclaimed by artists and activists, a leafy block in eastern Detroit surrounded by severe blight. The Yes Farm, a communal building with a stage and a studio, beckons on a corner, even if it doesn’t always have lights inside. Pickup soccer games happen on the empty lots at dusk. On a weekday evening Dutch artists in the middle of a two-month residency offered a talk on the sidewalk along with homemade fruit tarts.

But Detroit is far from idyllic. Jeff Sturges, who lives on Farnsworth Street and helps run the Fab Lab, a design shop in a trailer, pointed to a scar near his mouth, from an attempted holdup. “It’s an extreme city,” said Mr. Sturges, 33, an architect by training who moved here in September from the South Bronx. “There are some days where I get up and say, ‘What am I doing to myself?’ ” But, he quickly added, mostly he is pleased to be here. He recently started a hacker space, a collective for technology and art projects, one of a handful to open around Detroit within the last year.

Still, the number of people who have this creative do-gooder verve is small. The largest Soup only had 120 guests. “You can’t change a city of 800,000 with 200 people,” said Phil Cooley, an owner of the popular Slows Bar BQ in Detroit. “There’s so much work to do.”