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Delicious in Detroit
By Olga Bonfiglio [Olga Bonfiglio]
Friday, 07-Aug-2009, 18:09
August-September, 2009
Planning Magazine for Urban Planners
Detroit, once the nation's manufacturing hub, has 70,000 vacant lots, comprising about 27 percent of its 139 square miles. The city has lost one million residents since 1950 and hundreds of thousands of jobs since the early 1960s.
What to do with all that vacant land? One solution is to convert it to community gardens. That is the strategy being encouraged by the city council's Green Task Force, created by council president Kenneth Cockrel after he was appointed to his post in September 2008. This agency is partnering with several nonprofit organizations to encourage residents to adopt vacant city-owned land. Those who pay the $20 annual permit fee benefit by having the city plow the land, test the soil and provide seeds and seedlings for vegetables and flowers.
“We now realize that those people who were once dismissed as tree-huggers were actually futurists,” said Cockrel. “They saw what was coming and they anticipated it and moved to deal with it. And now we’re all dealing with it, and becoming environmentally conscious.”
Detroit has been here before--during the depression of the 1890s when Mayor Hazen Pingree encouraged residents to garden; during World War II, when victory gardens were common; and in the 1970s, when Mayor Coleman Young’s Farm-a-Lot Program also allowed people to grow food on vacant city lots.
In 1992 the late autoworker-activist James Boggs and his wife, Grace Lee Boggs, recognized that robots and globalization were reducing job opportunities in the city. They began Detroit Summer, an initiative aimed at getting citizens to envision alternative futures for themselves and their neighborhoods.
“Actually, it was a blessing that Detroit no longer had the illusion of expansion,” said Grace Lee Boggs, a former union and civil rights activist and one of the first Asian-Americans to receive a Ph.D. in philosophy. “You can bemoan your fate or, as the African-American elders taught, you can plant gardens.”
As the garden movement progressed, many nonprofit food organizations emerged to create the umbrella group known as the Garden Resource Program Collaborative in 2003. So far, these groups have inspired 359 family, 170 community and 40 school gardens throughout the city.
“The city government is catching up to the community,” said Kathryn Underwood, a planner who works with Detroit's Planning Commission and who sees the city as more intent on keeping track of and sanctioning residents’ use of the vacant lands.
Underwood’s own experience is a case in point. The vacant lot in her neighborhood was becoming a trash heap until she and her husband started a garden five years ago with six other families. Not only did the garden produce fresh, organic vegetables, but it beautified the area, engaged people of all ages, gave kids an opportunity to see where food comes from and provided a place for people to gather and talk.
“That's the way neighborhoods used to be,” said Underwood, who added that gardens have played a huge role in African-American cultural tradition, which is significant for Detroit since 80 percent of its population is African-American.
“Food is essential to daily life,” said Ashley Atkinson, one of a number of young leaders promoting urban gardens. She directs Greening of Detroit, which started in 1989 as a reforesting program for the city’s neighborhoods, boulevards and parks. She has been instrumental in developing gardening and youth education programs to help stabilize and redevelop neighborhoods.
“We build relationships before we do soil tests,” she said. “That ensures that the gardens are scaled correctly and not too overwhelming to the people who will work on them.”
There are other initiatives.
Last September the Detroit City Council set up a pilot land bank authority to oversee up to 10,000 city-owned properties. With the passage of PA 258 in 2004, the State of Michigan provided for local land banks in order to overcome obstacles like clouded title, prohibitively high prices, protracted sales transaction, a fragmented land disposition process and land speculation.
Last year the state also recognized the value of gardens and implemented its own Garden for Growth Program. For $50, residents can lease vacant state lands to grow a garden. Wayne County has a similar program for county-owned lands.
In 2007 the Next Detroit Neighborhood Initiative targeted six neighborhoods and designated $1.7 million for vacant lot reclamation (gardens, tree nurseries and pocket parks) out of the $8.9 million raised from private foundations, business and the state’s Cities of Promise program.
In its effort to utilize the city’s vacant land in alternative ways, Detroit is also trying to create dense urban centers surrounded by forests and connected by greenways, bike trails and light rail, said Rick Bowers, head of the Office of Sustainability.
Of course, the city isn’t overlooking the opportunity to gain a foothold in 21st century technologies like life sciences, fuel cells, information technology and advanced manufacturing.
“The potential is there,” said Bowers, “because Detroit has the infrastructure, zoned industrial land, an intricate railway system, a river that can transport goods anywhere, and a highly-skilled workforce.”
Meanwhile, a number of well-connected African-American community activists helped push for the creation of the Detroit Food Policy Council last March to address food security issues.
Fast food and processed foods have largely replaced home-cooked meals in many Detroit households leading to health problems like obesity, overweight, hypertension, diabetes and heart disease, said Malik Yakini, chairman of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network.
However, food security and healthy eating habits affect people across all racial, ethnic, age and income boundaries, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Nick Leonard, a pre-law student who grew up in a wealthy Detroit suburb, was indifferent to nutritious food until he pursued an internship with the urban gardens last summer. He not only learned how to grow organic vegetables but how to cook and enjoy eating them. Leonard also found gardening core to a sustainable lifestyle.
“Everyone can have a backyard garden,” he said, “or they can go to the farmer’s market. These approaches are good for the environment.”
Leonard also volunteered at Earthworks, another Detroit nonprofit food organization, which distributes fresh, locally-grown vegetables to low-income families and teaches children how to grow, cook and eat nutritious homegrown food. Earthworks began in 1997 on a vacant lot in order to help supply food for a local soup kitchen and food bank. It also built a 1,300-square-foot greenhouse that last year provided gardeners with nearly 130,000 seedlings and over 32,000 seeds for free.
“Local food systems and urban agriculture are valuable tools for regional economic development,” said Kami Pothukuchi, associate professor of geography and urban planning at Wayne State University, “because they have a great potential for creating jobs, developing small businesses and keeping precious dollars in the community.”
Actually, this was the way it worked until the 1950s, said Pothukuchi, when an “industrialized food system” took over feeding the nation with processed foods at cheap prices and eventually became a trillion-dollar globalized system with a handful of corporations controlling most food production, processing, distribution, retailing and waste management.
“Unfortunately, corporate domination of the food system has meant that food eaten in most U.S. communities is produced outside the community,” said Pothukuchi. “This then lowers the local tax base and reduces the number and variety of jobs available to local people.”
Detroit, like so many other central cities, has only a few grocery stores where residents may buy a variety of nutritious, high-quality, culturally appropriate foods. Residents spend approximately $500 million every year in food stores outside the city, she said.
Last year, Pothukuchi started the Sustainable Food Systems Education and Engagement in Detroit Program (SEED Wayne for short) to engage students in building a sustainable local food system. It works with a number of community partners to offer activities related to food security, urban agriculture, farmers markets, farm-to-institution and food policy.
The Eastern Market contributes to Detroit’s local food system by featuring over 300 locally-owned businesses, booths for “Grown in Detroit” urban garden produce and the new Detroit Market Garden Project, a 2.5 acre demonstration site with gardens, hoop houses, greenhouses and training programs in food production and finance.
“[The Market Garden] is truly a well-rounded green project that can serve as an urban laboratory where people see the entire process of growing, processing, distributing and retailing food,” said Carmody, the market's manager.
Urban gardening as an economic development tool is being used not only in Detroit but in Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, New York, Portland, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.
Consequently, planners may consider urban agriculture for their city's vacant lands not as a cure-all, but as a way to help residents to feed their families nutritional food, to enhance neighborhoods and to make cities more sustainable.
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