Cultivating the Future

by Stephen A. Jones
May 1, 2010

Sometime in the late 1980s I interviewed a regional planner at SEMCOG for a newspaper story about the impact of suburban sprawl on the metropolitan Detroit area. I no longer recall the gentleman’s name and remember the interview mainly because of an ironic joke he made.

Discussing the struggles Detroit faced in coping with the continued outflow of people, businesses and jobs to increasingly far-flung areas of Macomb, Oakland, Washtenaw and Livingston counties, the man made a passing reference to what he called Mayor Coleman Young’s “pasture-ization program.”

“He’s turning the city into pastures,” the man said with a grim smile.

I didn’t take the joke to be a slap at Young but rather a bit of gallows humor about the bleak challenge Young and the city faced in pursuing economic redevelopment. It was so easy — and inexpensive — for manufacturers to throw up a new factory on a piece of farmland in Oakland or Macomb that Detroit’s only hope to compete was to clear and detoxify huge tracts and essentially turn it back into farmland to be redeveloped by industry.

That conversation took place not long after the huge, bitter fight in Detroit and Hamtramck over clearing 362 acres of land for General Motors to build its Poletown assembly plant. The fight caused deep, lasting divisions in the community — not to mention hardship and grief for those who were forced out of the bulldozed neighborhoods. That the new factory never generated all the jobs that were promised to justify the demolition of 1,200 homes, churches and small businesses lingered as salt in the wound.

Around that same time, the rotting hulk of the old Uniroyal plant on the riverfront near Belle Isle was torn down. Over the decades, numerous schemes for redeveloping that 39-acre site have been floated — including the idea of a Motown theme park — but none has ever borne fruit.

I thought about all that history recently as I watched the city’s desperation splayed — yet again — across the national airwaves in NBC Dateline’s report, “City of Heartbreak and Hope.” Two things stood out to me in that broadcast, beyond the bleak and familiar images of poverty, abandonment and decay.

The first was Mayor Dave Bing’s plan to downsize the city by moving people out of sparsely populated neighborhoods and bulldozing what empty houses and other structures remain. The city can no longer afford to provide services like water, sewer, streetlights and road maintenance for huge areas that have only a handful of houses on each block. It is cheaper and more effective, Bing argues, to move the few remaining people out of those areas, bulldoze the vacant buildings and concentrate the city’s efforts on providing services to the viable neighborhoods that remain.

Bing is already seeking federal aid to accelerate the pace of demolition. This is Young’s pasture-ization program on steroids — the conscious transformation of a vast city back into the farmland from which it rose.

On one level, the prospect is profoundly sad and appalling. It seems we are witnessing — or taking part in — the euthanasia of a once-great city. What then? Do we declare Jack Kevorkian our patron saint and submit to the predictable Dateline follow-up — “City of Casinos and Cabbages”?

Or do we stop thinking of Detroit as a city at all? Does it splinter into a handful of surviving neighborhoods that eventually separate into independent cities that end up looking a lot like Sterling Heights or Farmington or Livonia did in the 1970s? Except older — and almost certainly still poorer?

What would that do to the creative — if conflicted — tension between the core city and the surrounding suburbs? That tension, be it good or ill, has bound the communities of southeastern Michigan together as a giant factory of wealth production for nearly all of the last century. If the core city at the heart of that great factory collapses — all but vanishes — what then? It is hard not to hear the brooding lines of Yeats echo in our ears:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

But there was a second thing that stood out in the Dateline report that may offer a glimmer of hope, however faint. It didn’t get a lot of attention during the report, but for those, like myself, who seek reasons for optimism, the discussion of the urban agriculture movement raised intriguing possibilities.

In the last few years, groups like Greening of Detroit and the Detroit Agriculture Network have developed more than 800 gardens and small farms — the largest about two acres — on vacant land in Detroit, Hamtramck and Highland Park. Several of the groups have come together as the Urban Agriculture Workshop (note the UAW acronym) to work with city officials on developing an official policy to promote the development of agriculture on open city land.

According to a city Planning Commission document, the existing gardens and farms supported six weekly farmers’ markets during the 2009 growing season. The Grown in Detroit cooperative sold more than 23,000 pounds of local produce last year and donated 1,100 pounds of food to the Capuchin Soup Kitchen and Spirit of Hope Church. The policy proposal suggests urban farming could provide jobs and opportunities for small businesses; produce environmental benefits by growing more food locally; reuse vacant land in a productive way; help stabilize neighborhoods; and help reduce such social hazards as crime and illegal dumping.

I don’t know. It will be easy for cynics to dismiss the idea as quixotic or naïve — like a Motown theme park on the Uniroyal site.

But on the other hand, there is a certain pleasing symmetry in the idea of transforming Detroit back into farmland. Detroit has given so much — to the region and the nation. It was the city’s great industrial success that produced the wealth that created the suburbs where the affluent now have the luxury (in which, thankfully, not all indulge) to shake their heads in pity or scorn at the wreck Detroit has become.

I grew up in Washtenaw County’s Augusta Township when it was almost entirely farmland. The house my parents built in 1959 was the first ripple in a rising flood of suburbanization that has gobbled up most of the fields that once surrounded our home.

Perhaps it is time for the arc to come full circle; for the fertile suburban land that has been paved over in the last half century to be replaced by newly vacant land at the urban core that is restored to fertility and productivity. For decades, Detroit provided the jobs that built all those suburban homes. Now, maybe, we can help put food on their dining room tables.

Detroit began, after all, as a patchwork of strip farms established by French settlers along the river. And it is quite likely that the Detroiters who gazed out on the smoldering ruins of their homes and shops the morning after the great fire in June 1805 felt the same despair their modern counterparts felt at seeing the aerial view of urban decay and desolation aired on Dateline.

Detroit’s motto is a reminder of that fire: Speramus meliora; resurget cineribus — “We hope for better things, it will rise from the ashes.”

We have been here before and we have survived.

Perhaps we just need to find new ways to cultivate our future.

Stephen A. Jones is a Detroit resident and assistant professor of History at Central Michigan University. He is co-editor with Eric Freedman of African Americans in Congress: A Documentary History (Congressional Quarterly Press).