Detroit has developed an amazing array of urban farm spaces created by citizens getting together and doing what needs to be done to save themselves in a city that has reached a strange level of steady-state collapse. Here is a brief excerpt from Rebecca Solnit's 2007 Harper's article, Detroit Arcadia:
This continent has not seen a transformation like Detroit's since the last days of the Maya. The city, once the fourth largest in the country, is now so depopulated that some stretches resemble the outlying farmland and others are altogether wild. Downtown still looks like a downtown, and all of those high-rise buildings still make an impressive skyline, but when you look closely at some of them, you can see trees growing out of the ledges and crevices, an invasive species from China known variously as the ghetto palm and the tree of heaven. Local wisdom has it that whenever a new building goes up, an older one will simply be abandoned, and the same rule applies to the blocks of new condos that have been dropped here and there among the ruins: why they were built in the first place in a city full of handsome old houses going to ruin has everything to do with the momentary whims of the real estate trade and nothing to do with the long-term survival of cities.
The transformation of the residential neighborhoods is more dramatic. On so many streets in so many neighborhoods, you see a house, a little shabby but well built and beautiful. Then another house. Then a few houses are missing, so thoroughly missing that no trace of foundation remains. Grass grows lushly, as though nothing had ever disturbed the pastoral verdure. Then there's a house that's charred and shattered, then a beautiful house, with gables and dormers and a porch, the kind of house a lot of Americans fantasize about owning. Then more green. This irregular pattern occurs mile after mile, through much of Detroit. You could be traveling down Wa bash Street on the west side of town or Pennsylvania or Fairview on the east side of town or around just about any part of the State Fair neighborhood on the city's northern border. Between the half-erased neighborhoods are ruined factories,
boarded-up warehouses, rows of storefronts bearing the traces of failed enterprise, and occasional solid blocks of new town houses that look as though they had been dropped in by helicopter. In the bereft zones, solitary figures wander slowly, as though in no hurry to get from one abandoned zone to the next. Some areas have been stripped entirely, and a weedy version of nature is returning. Just about a third of Detroit, some forty square miles, has evolved past decrepitude into vacancy and prairie—an urban void nearly the size of San Francisco.
This is a great place to go if you want to start making links between our political/economic system and and the work of farmers, urban or otherwise. There is no way that visionary urban farmers will achieve their goals without building solidarity with a lot of other related movements and a lot of people from those movements will be in Detroit.
Keith
______________________________
Keith Possee
Medicinal Herb Garden
Biology Department
Box 351800
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195-1800
USA
phone: (206) 543-0436
FAX: (206) 616-2011
On Thu, 3 Jun 2010, Elizabeth Wheat wrote:
> Hello Farmers,
>
> Last night at the all farm meeting I brought up the idea of trying to attend a conference this summer in Milwaukee at Will Allen's Growing Power farm. The conference is centered around urban agriculture and will be bringing together leaders from around the country to speak on the subject.
>
> I think it would be great for our farm to try to send 3-4 people. It will be a little expensive, but perhaps we can begin brainstorming now some ways to raise funds to help send some folks east! The cost will be a plane ticket and then registration/sleeping accommodations it which will be roughly $380/person.
>
> The conference runs from September 10-12.
>
> If you are interested in being part of a delegation to this event from the UW Farm - please e-mail me and we could get together and start planning our trip!
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> See you at the Pizza Bake tomorrow!
>
> Beth_______________________________________________
> TheUWfarm mailing list
> TheUWfarm@u.washington.edu
> http://mailman2.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/theuwfarm
>
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