Plowing Detroit Into Farmland - Idea of the Day Blog
Today’s idea: Detroit’s “massive failure” makes possible a radical transformation of the blighted city, an article says, including shrinking it down to its urban core and turning much of the place over to crops. And an ineffective government is actually a plus.
F. Costantini for The New York Times Fords into plowshares? No, this is an old Chrysler lot.
Cities | Could Detroit pull a reverse Joni Mitchell — unpave its parking lots to put up a metro-agrarian paradise? That’s a glib yet hopeful way to think about the urban experiments envisioned or under way in the city, as described by Aaron M. Renn in an article in New Geography.
Renn says the sheer size of Detroit — a largely vacant urban prairie bigger than Manhattan, Boston and San Francisco combined — makes it a prime test case for the “shrinking cities” movement. And so an American Institute of Architects study imagines Detroit reduced into a metro core surrounded by green belts, “urban villages” and banked land.
Already, Urban Farming, an international outfit that has made Detroit its headquarters, is said to boast some 500 small plots under cultivation to supply free food to the city’s poor. “It wouldn’t surprise me, frankly, if Detroit produces more food inside its borders today than any other traditional American city,” Renn writes.
Even raccoon- and pheasant-hunting is not unheard of within the protein-poor city’s limits. Yes, a retired truck driver reportedly shoots raccoons and sells them as food, at $12 per carcass to feed a family of four.
Such is Detroit today. But in a nightmare town where a house can cost less than the TV you put inside, loftier dreams can also be dreamt — especially, Renn says, when government doesn’t get in the way: “In Detroit, the incapacity of the government is actually an advantage in many cases. There’s not much chance a strong city government could really turn the place around, but it could stop the grass roots revival in its tracks.” [New Geography; background: The Week]
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