June 11, 1805, Detroit was on fire. A city of a mere 600 people — a local baker lost control in his bakery and a fire would start. It would spread from building to building, nearly destroying the small city in it’s entirety.

What do you do when you can start anew? How do you go from nothing? Do you leave and head back east? Do you stay, and rebuild?

Of course, they decided to stay and rebuild. After the fire, Augustus Woodward created a brand new street plan. It was deeply inspired by D.C. and Paris planning, featuring diagonal streets and wide avenues that radiated from a center — spokes of a wheel.

That efforts of that plan is our downtown. Budding up against the river, the design can be a little confusing if you are not familiar with it. But to anyone who has had the privilege of walking around and exploring downtown Detroit, you know how beautiful the city is. The street network encourages you to explore, leading you to little nooks and crannies where you want to know what’s around the corner. Around those corners: parks and grand avenues.

The efforts of Augustus Woodward are still present today in that original downtown plan. The layout, of course, still mostly resembles what was planned. And something more profound: we are living the dream set up by those who came before us — over 200 years ago. They dreamt Detroit would be rebuilt and would continue to grow. They placed a bet: and it worked. Detroit would come to rise as one of the greatest industrial cities in the world.

This event, the Detroit fire, would lead to our motto: “Speramus meliora; resurget cineribus,” which means “We hope for better things; it will arise from the ashes.”

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This motto means so much more now. After bankruptcy in 2013, after decades of population loss, decades of mounting debt, crime, and decline, Detroit has been rising from the ashes. Of course, we still have issues. We still do have blight. We still do have a high crime rate. We still do have underfunded city departments. But those in Detroit and it’s metro area made a bet: Detroit can comeback. And comeback we did. When the country thought Detroit was dying, we knew Detroit didn’t go anywhere. From the ashes of bankruptcy, we would rise.

Between the incredible transformation of the urban core, the revitalization happening around around key corridors around the city, the stabilization of house prices, the population increase we experienced last year, the transformation of Michigan Central, the Hudson Site, the Gordie Howe bridge, and so so so much more, it’s hard to be anything but excited about the future. But there is still so much more to do: opportunity is not spread evenly. The city needs to grow in population. Our tax base needs to continue to strengthen. We are losing young residents to other cities that have more opportunity. We have neighborhoods where there is little local economy for residents to participate in.

So I implore you: continue to dream. Aim for the moon, land among the stars. We grew by 1,800 residents in the last census estimate. That’s amazing and worth celebrating! But let’s aim for 180,000 residents. Let’s get out of the mindset of mediocrity and return to what Detroit is meant to be: a world class city.

If all you see are problems, the task is insurmountable. If you just find one thing that you can work on, build, and fix, then the task becomes much more manageable. When Woodward thought about how to revive Detroit from the ashes, I’m sure there was a moment when he was disheartened. But he did what he could do: he made a plan.

How do we get 180,000 residents? How do we see revival in the parts of the city that are still struggling? We continue to dream. We keep rolling up our sleeves and getting to work. We do this not just for ourselves, but for those that will come after us who get to experience our dream.

So do the next smallest thing. And do it now.

This article was supported by RiskyTrees: riskytrees.com