Urban Farming in Detroit
By Karina | March 17, 2010
A few weeks ago I came across an article that I’ve been mulling over ever since – about the millionaire John Hantz and his plan to make Detroit into an ultra modern urban farm. See, Detroit has been dealing with foreclosures and urban blight for longer than most of us – and now it’s looking at about 30% vacant land, which can be dirty and ugly, or lovely and repurposed. One of the big problems with this vacancy rate is that it stretches city services too thin – it takes longer for police or fire to respond to emergencies, for one. The mayor is urging residents to move into the downtown city core, but others are concerned that this is just a land-grab effort.
Regardless of motivation, Detroit is pretty bleak (as an urban center). If you do a Google Earth Flyover you can see how many blocks just have one or two houses on them,and how much empty space is available. So what’s to be done with all that open space? Organizations like Greening of Detroit are going out right now and planting, and there are lots of urban farmers making a good go of it currently in “downtown detroit” – and have been for several years, as this 2008 NPR story would indicate - and not coincidentally, back when the housing crisis was really picking up, and foreclosures were becoming more common. And in general, Detroit is very large in area for it’s population, and I dare say always has been. The graphic above shows the population compared to the area of Detroit vs several other cities – and Detroit is larger Boston, Manhattan and San Francisco combined – but the population doesn’t even go anywhere near (these cities combined – or even grouped together. So what’s the solution? Urban farms for everyone, with a spreadout infrastructure? Or have everyone crowd into the downtown?
Anyone out there familiar with Detroit, or other similar infill proposals for areas hard-hit by foreclosures?
[[Map by Dan Pitera, a professor of architecture at University of Detroit Mercy, via cityfarmer.info.]]
Topics: Food, General, Media | 3 Comments »
I’m from the Detroit area, and the downtown has been bleak for my entire life – and it’s so sad because you can see the husk of a city as great as my adopted home of Chicago – only left for dead. A friend of mine works in an environmental engineering firm in the Big D. She’s done a little research into the urban farming plans for the city, and while she’s hopeful to see a community reborn via agriculture, as an engineer – there’s a lot of brownfield reclamation work that would need to be done to clear out the land, and clean the soil before you’d want to be feeding yourself off the land. That said, there’s a lot of grassroots work going on to do SOMETHING downtown, and I hope that one day when I go back and visit family there, that we’ll see LIFE in the city again.
as I read your comment I something crystallized for me:
academically, it’s such an interesting problem and a great opportunity – but at the same time we have to realize that there are actual real live people there! who are dealing with these issues right now!
I, too, am from the Detroit area and I am in the city on average of 4 days a week. This problem is nothing new to us, but I’m glad it’s starting to get some national attention. While some might say it’s embarrassing, I think it’s a ripe opportunity to come together and do something positive that may set an example.
Ultimately, I think we need to shrink the size of the city and open up that land to urban farming and new communities. There is just not enough of a tax base to provide basic city services as it stands. The last I checked, there wasn’t even curbside recycling available, let alone the kind of public education that these kids deserve.