The one city that can become its own supply zone?

DETROIT — On the city’s east side, where autoworkers once assembled cars by the millions, nature is taking back the land.

Cottonwood trees grow through the collapsed roofs of homes stripped for scrap metal. Wild grasses carpet the rusty shells of empty factories, now home to pheasants and wild turkeys.

This green veil is proof of how far this city has fallen from its industrial heyday and, to a small group of investors, a clear sign. Detroit, they say, needs to get back to what it was before Henry Ford moved to town: farmland.

“There’s so much land available, and it’s begging to be used,” said Michael Score, president of the Hantz Farms, which is buying up abandoned sections of the city’s 139-square-mile landscape and plans to transform them into a large-scale commercial farm enterprise.

“Farming is how Detroit started,” Score said, “and farming is how Detroit can be saved.”

That’s one fantasy. Here is another:

Seattle_12.png

Seattle without humans.

How it will all end:

All of this—self-sufficient cities; cities without humans—can never be anything more than a fantasy. A part of me can not part with the realism of the urban shadow; another part of me has to side with the fiction of correlationism.

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...

11 replies on “Some See Farming in the Future of Detroit”

  1. Could you imagine the birds making homes out of all these buildings? Man, it’s a cool thought. I wish I could live to see the day when nature pushes back into our cities. Just a vast wilderness with a few steel frames jutting up from the treeline.

    Cool post.

  2. Good Morning Charles,
    Yeah, I read that this morning in the NYT as well. I find it fascinating and practical considering the state of Michigan is in a state of depression vs. a recession. I read several months ago that the city of Flint, MI is indeed going to raze several abandoned homes and the original forest is to reclaim the vacant lots. The city is essentially dimishing in size (population, area etc.). Detroit and vicinity offer a glimpse of the post-industrial future in the USA. I haven’t been there recently but I understand it looks like a ghostown. I genuinely believe unemployment will gets worse in the coming months. America simply isn’t the manufacturing giant it was 5 decades ago. Alas, the moniker “factory of the world” now belongs to China.

  3. Just because half the people in Michigan are unemployed doesn’t mean everyone will desert it …. ok, they probably will, but just the young people.

    Actually, I think you mean “polluter of the world”, lark.

  4. Jesus Christ, switching from the auto industry to fucking farming? Out of the frying pan, into the high-risk, low-profit fire. I mean, why not suggest that everyone try to become professional basketball players while they’re at it?

  6. I grew up in Flint and had relatives in Detroit. Detroit has been like that for decades, starting with abandoned housing just outside the city core that fell into ruin and/or was razed after the 60s riots. Detroit does have many wide open fields flush with pheasant, glittering with broken glass and dotted with piles of brick and other debris. I would imagine one barrier to converting some of the feral land to farming would be that much of it is undoubtedly brownfield. Certainly the former industrial sites. However, there should be ample ground water for irrigation as necessary, provided it isn’t also contaminated.

  7. Chuckles is just afraid that if more people start growing their own food instead of relying on rural people to do it for them, they too shall become rural people, his greatest pseudo-intellectual fear.

  10. @4: Subsistence farming, not agri-business farming. Read the Harper’s magazine article “Detroit Arcadia,” July 2007. Google it.

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