The environment in downtown Flint is conducive to many activities. Pokémon GO might not be the first one that is top of mind, but the city’s walkability and unique landmarks actually make it a perfect location to play.
A committed group has been doing just that weekly for years on Wednesdays around 5:30 p.m. near the Ferris Wheel building.
“I’ve always played Pokémon GO, and it just seemed like a no-brainer (to organize the weekly meetups),” said Joanna Bird, a certified tourism ambassador (CTA) who leads the weekly meetups through the What’s Up Downtown Project’s (WUDP) program to support citizen-driven efforts that activate spaces in downtown Flint. “There are a lot of stops downtown, it’s a really convenient space to do a lot of raids really quickly.”
WUDP has created dozens of types of tours that are aimed at getting small groups of people exploring and enjoying spaces in downtown Flint. Those include a photography tour, in which local photographers take groups to different spots to let them capture elements of Flint through their unique frame of reference. They’ve had a pop-up art-themed event where people can paint or draw their own art projects on an “art cart.” There has been a fashion tour, led by Adriana Lanice, producer of the 810 Fashion Show. There have been weekly activities in downtown’s alleys, including yard game competitions in Buckham Alley in which participants can win gift cards to local restaurants. The point is, simply, to listen to residents’ ideas and get people enjoying the many public spaces downtown offers.
Jerin Sage, director of placemaking with the Greater Flint Arts Council and What’s Up Downtown, said that previously, the organization had done larger events or activations, but those didn’t have the staying power or lasting impact of the smaller tour format. The tours keep people coming into downtown more often than they might just for a one-off event, which can be expensive to produce and require permits and other logistics and planning.
“These tours have proven to bring people back in a real way, it’s not just like what I call a firework,” Sage said. “Which is, you spend all this time and money and energy and effort to make this event that’s really beautiful and awesome. And everyone loves it, but then it’s gone and the only way to get it back is to have another fireworks show. These (the tours) have a little more longevity, and it creates more than just a one-time thing.”
In addition to the Pokémon GO meetups, Bird has done an Alice in Wonderland themed tour and a bubble-themed tour.
“Originally I was just doing tours in general, like trying to come up with stuff to entertain people downtown,” Bird said.
As an avid player of the game, though, she knew that there was a community of players in Flint, and she thought it could be a good way to encourage people to connect and meet each other while also enjoying the game and learning about the city. Bird is a Flint native who graduated from Mott Middle College and Mott Community College and attended the University of Michigan-Flint, so she’s familiar with the landscape downtown and tries to share that with others.
“When I take them on tours, I try to show them the cool murals, different spots to walk by the river that you might not have thought of,” she said. “And Willson Park, which is a great shaded park right next to U of M. There’s been a few times I’ve had people come and be like, ‘I’ve never seen this before,’ and been really interested in learning more about the downtown area.”
For Sage, the goal of the tours is twofold. They serve as a low-cost, regularly occurring way to bring visitors into downtown and create more foot traffic. And they also allow him to tap into Flint’s creative community to come up with new ideas for tours and give them ways to share their talents with the public.
“These are resident-driven tours where people from our community can come through and highlight their passions, their projects, their skills, their interests all in a place-based type of way,” Sage said. “I challenge anybody and everybody, anything you can do for an hour-long presentation whether it’s on a stage, speeches, in a classroom, workshops, whatever, I challenge people to deconstruct those to between three and five physical locations in our downtown so that we now have little lessons at each spot. So now those talents are tied to locations. That keeps it interesting, it keeps people physically in motion, but also mentally and socially in motion and ties experiences to the downtown more. The more comfortable people get coming downtown, the more viable an option it is when they’re saying, ‘Hey, where should we go? What should we do?’”
Sage also says they’ve tried to arrange and schedule tour nights so that more than one is going on downtown at a time. That way, even if the tours are small or niche and only have 5-10 people each, if more than one is happening at once, it is getting 20-30 people downtown walking around and experiencing or discovering new things.
Sage says that the tours and other What’s Up Downtown activations have helped bring around 35,000 people into downtown Flint over the past three years since the organization moved under the Greater Flint Arts Council. And the continued success will rely in part on tapping into even more residents to come up with their own unique ideas, including some tours that would be conducive to winter. He encourages people interested in pitching ideas to reach out to him at flintplacemaking@gmail.com.
“The whole basis of What’s Up Downtown is to bring people together and to highlight the talents that our people have within our community, so that they’re at the forefront of our program,” Sage said. “They’re in the public eye as much as possible so that we can try to honor them, we can try to pay them, we can try to connect them with all the resources that we have around here and really push the beautification and the development of our city and the future of our people, more into the people’s hands and let them be the experts, let them tell us what they need, and then sit down at that table and hear them.”
On Bird’s Pokémon GO tours, helping people have new experiences in Flint is a big reward for her. The group is open to anyone, whether they’re new to the game or experienced players. She also said that some of the challenges in the game require multiple players, so being a part of the tour group can help with those elements.
“Just getting to meet people and take them around the city, for me it’s just great seeing them enjoy themselves and interact with each other,” she said. “I have a lot of good memories right here downtown, and I like helping others make good ones too.”
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