Shrinking cities and urban farming Detroit and the Rust Belt: is there any future for the city?
Research paper - History - Sociology - Urban policies
History of architecture in the contemporary age Garcia Vazquez Carlos Gabriel Piacenza, February 2013 Betta Alessandro 747097
The story's always the same Seven hundred tons of metal a day Now sir you tell me the world's changed Once I made you rich enough Rich enough to forget my name Bruce Springsteen - Youngstown
Urban shrinkage in the American Rust-Belt: history and perspectives
Shrinking cities, which have experienced a loss of jobs and population for at least a couple of decades, are nowadays a worldwide phenomenon. In lots of countries, especially in what is called the “developed” or “industrialized” world, many cities are experiencing the effects of the globalized economy, like relocation of factories and workforce, and of the recent economical crisis; what is impressive and shocking are the dimensions that this phenomenon has assumed in the NorthEast of the United States where entire states are literally disappearing from the economical map of the Union. For an European student it’s difficult to understand the idea that cities can simply be abandoned to their destiny as if they are nothing more than a consumer good. This is, for me, a sort of “cultural shock” that forces myself to revise the entire conception of what is a city.
While colonizing the West, America had seen lots of “boom and bust” cities such, for example Butte in Montana. But we have to consider that during the colonization the Western territory was a sort of “tabula rasa”, a blank page with nothing on it. There were no consolidated economic and social structures and cities were built as sort of “wooden temporary dwellings” nearby a mining site or a train station. Today, however, the situation is completely different; those cities are part of a complex system of economical, social and spatial relationships and to my point of view the question is how it is possible that these cities are simply disappearing from the map without having any effect on this complex system. There are two main aspects to compute while talking of this phenomenon; the first is, as already said, how it is possible that such cities are simply left to their destiny, nothing more than the factories which had generate them, and the second is how this situation it’s leading to a completely new way of planning and “building” the city; a complete reconsideration of the idea of never ending growth, so typical of the American approach.
I will concentrate my research on the region known as the “Rust Belt”, which includes states as Pennsylvania, Maryland, Indiana, Illinois and of course the two “failed state” of Ohio and Michigan. This is the region where we can say that the phenomenon of shrinking cities started and where it has been fought with the biggest efforts and even with the most creative initiatives. In this paper I will try to underline the main reasons for the decline of these cities, starting immediately after the second world war and continuing with the great oil and industrial crisis of the seventies. After this introduction I will try to investigate one of the possible answers given by citizens and public administrations to face this challenge. In particular I will consider the situation of Detroit and the possibilities offered by urban agriculture and farming; by having a closer look to a particular fact that happened in the last months and which is the occasion to talk not only about urban farming but also about what will be the future of those good practices. Detroit, once the world’s capital city of car production, is becoming in these days the capital city of urban farming; initiatives involving the cultivation of vacant lots with orchards, fruit trees and flowers are becoming more and more common and gained the support of the public administration. These initiatives are giving to a great part of Detroit’s population the possibility to improve their life by learning and working in co-operative orchards. The debate on the future of shrinking cities is, from my point of view, a debate which involves all
the cities in the world; it’s not only a matter of vacant lots, loss of population and economic crisis. It regards the future shape of cities, the very idea of how a city will have to be. It’s a challenge which is related to the future relationship between the man, the society and the nature; the relationship between the humanity and its most “powerful” creation: the city. Baltimore “reinvented the city”, Youngstown is planning the “smart shrinkage”, Flint and Buffalo are moving to a “deconstruction economy” and Detroit and Milwaukee are boosting “urban agriculture” plans; even not taking into account what is happening in Europe, all these possibilities shows how many are the answers people can give to a single, particular situation and how important is this debate. Ohio and Michigan used to be the “core” of American industrialization until the second world war, they were the engine of the winning “democratic arsenal” which won the 2nd world war and imposed the “American way of life” all over the globe. In those states, and in some other states of the eastern coast such as Illinois, Maryland, New York or Pennsylvania, the migrations, both from inside U.S.A and from other countries, played a fundamental role in the growth of the economy. At that time America was divided into the industrial, rich and powerful “core” and the rural, poor and underdeveloped “fringe” represented by the South-West states such as Texas, Arizona, Nevada and even California. Within the industrialized belt of the North-East part of America few cities hosted in their downtown the headquarters of more or less all the biggest heavy industries of U.S.A.. Cities such as Detroit, Flint, Youngstown, Baltimore and of course Chicago were in that period the most important nodes of the most important economic zone of the world. How it has been possible that such a powerful and important economic zone has been simply abandoned both by the central federal government, corporations and by their inhabitants? How it is possible to imagine another future here, and, if it is possible, how will be this future?
History of the shrinkage: people moving away from Rust Belt cities First movement: from North-East cities to South-West cities
It is impossible to imagine the growth of American economy and power by looking only at the rust belt cities, or,better, to their ruins. The growth rate of the United States during the XX century, higher than other “western world” countries, can be explained only by the even greater growth of what is called the Sun Belt. America’s economy has been pushed on by states such as Texas, California or Arizona. To underline this growth and social change there is an interesting data, calculated by the U.S. Bureau of Census, called “mean centre” of American population. This represent the centre of gravity of an imaginary solid map of the United States calculated as if each person on the map is equal to a weight unit. From 1900 to 2000 it has moved from Bartholomew County (Indiana) to Texas County (Missouri); this means that it has moved for around 450 miles direction South-West. Of course together with the population also economical activities and political importance moved to the South. Other data shows how the influence of Sun Belt states on American economy grew during the last century. For example, at the beginning of the century, in the entire West (from Dakota, to Missouri, Tennessee and the Pacific coast) lived more or less 4 million of people, the same amount hosted within the nowadays administrative border of the city of Phoenix (Arizona); it means that population in this part of United States has grown from 4 to 63 million of inhabitants in less than a century. Still in the fifties Edward Ullman, a famous geographer, defined this kind of distribution of urban and economical power with the idea of a small “core” (East Coast and Midwest) controlling the big “fringe” (South-West); in the “core” there were 68% of manufacturing workers and the output was 90% of gross domestic product, all the most important universities and corporations were located here (the Ivy League universities, General Motors, Ford, General Electric, U.S Steel and many others). Ullman said that the “core” regenerated itself without even considering the rest of the country, which he defined as “a pack of hungry dogs fighting for a bone”. Only twenty or thirty years later those definition must be reversed; with North-East metropolis experiencing a continuing loss of inhabitants and South-West metropolis rising with exceptional rates. Again some data to understand the dimensions of this phenomenon; Las Vegas (Nevada) raised from 127.000 inhabitants in 1960 to 1.650.000 in 2005 and Phoenix (Arizona) from 726.000 to 3.715.000 inhabitants during the same period; in the meantime Buffalo lost 12% of its population and Pittsburgh 13%. For sure technological achievements such as air conditioning played a great role in this population movement; the possibility of having air conditioning equipment and maintenance with low prices made possible for lot of elderly people to move towards Florida and Nevada after their retirement, or simply made possible to live in a comfortable way in state as Texas or Arizona where the dry desert climate was a big obstacle to urban and industrial development. Mass transportation systems such as the highway grid, the development of a huge inner flights grid and information technology improvements made the advantages of city concentration of North-East less important for the economical growth. Of course also the combination between low land costs and big void spaces was an important reason, but since the seventies economists and sociologists tried to elaborate more complex theories to account also the role of the central government, the strategies
of the big corporations and even the importance of the federal organization of the country. We can say that the great amount of public works made during the New Deal period was for sure a great boost to the economical rise of the South-West; probably without the money and the experience of the federal agencies such as Public Works Administration and National Recovery Administration the Sun Belt would never have been developed. Only in the sixties, although, this trend became evident when 60% of military budget took the way of few sites located in the three states of California, Texas and Florida (just think to Cape Canaveral). This part of the United States became the showcase for the best technological innovations boosted by the military industry and this was one of the reasons that caused the beginning of the decline of Rust Belt cities. During the Cold War period it became clear that for future wars information technology would become the most important weapon and for the steel industries of the Rust Belt this meant the loss of the army orders. As said by Wallace Stegner, a famous American writer, said that in the sixties in the West there were more federal employees than cowboys. What was incredible at that time was the disproportion between Washington’s amount of investments in the Sun Belt and the taxes collected there; basically, cities of the Manufacturing Belt (later called Rust Belt) were paying for the development of the South-West and they were digging their own grave. Soon the biggest services, insurances and airlines corporations moved their headquarters to those cities (a popular saying tells that even to go to hell you must pass through Hartsfield-Jackson airport of Atlanta (Georgia) which is the American Airlines main hub).
It is now clear that the decline of Rust Belt cities was not only caused by the rising of Japan and Asiatic industries with their impressive boom in sectors such as car manufacturing or domestic appliances, historically strengths of American industry; but also by the ability of South-West entrepreneurs to “catch the train” of high-technology industry such as electronics (boosted by Pentagon military program). If it’s not enough those entrepreneurs understood before everyone else that they needed a new shape of production based on smaller sites, more flexible working agreements and productive systems, low working costs and reduced worker-unions power. It’ easy to understand why this kind of work organization was more successful. The competition with Japan ad other countries for the predominance on the industrial market caused a strong reduction on prices of lots of consumer goods and that means for an entrepreneur less and less profits if he cannot reduce somehow the production costs. The big blast furnaces of the Rust Belt were not easily changeable into new ways of production, factories which had built heavy mechanical products for decades were not easily convertible onto high-technology smaller productions such as radio or TV- sets. Added to these reasons in the Rust Belt working costs were lot higher than other parts of the country; here unions such as UAW (United Auto Workers of the World) held a huge power and influenced a lot the decisions about salaries, working hours, workers dismissal and so on due to the agreements made between the big corporations and the unions in which corporations gave lots of advantages in exchange of a sort of “social peace” to avoid strikes and conflicts. The Rust Belt workers had more or less the same living standards as the middle class in the other parts of the country. Starting from the sixties the necessity for corporations to reduce costs and of South-West governors to improve their economies perfectly matched in a sort of “killing machine” for the NorthEast states. Most of North-East manufacturing cities were “company towns”, cities built by and for
a specific company which controlled more or less every part of inhabitants’ life (in Newtown, Iowa, the appliances company Maytag employed 30% of inhabitants directly and everything, from the shops to the basic services was guaranteed by Maytag controlled factories); this means that once the company failed or had to reduce the number of its workers all the city will follow the destiny of the company itself. In the Sun Belt workers earned extremely-low salaries (in 1974 a Michigan’s worker earned 5,5 dollars per hour, a worker from Texas less than 2,9 dollars per hour); the trade unions were more or less non-existent, taxes were very low (the average amount of taxes in New York was 841 dollars per year, in Houston 175 dollars per year) and there were no environmental laws and duties preventing development. If we add to this framework a generalized “inter-state war” to attract factories and tax-payers in which South-West states offered a cocktail of incentives and low-taxes it’s easy to understand this first movement. Second movement: from inner city to suburbia “The Out of Towners” was a funny comedy shown in 1970 based on the misadventures of the Kellerman family once arrived into New York city. The film shows perfectly what was the idea of the inner city dominating imaginary of suburban population at that time. In those years United States was the only nation in which suburbs was the way of living of the majority of population. All the efforts were directed to the development of suburbia and the city was a sort of uncomfortable presence to hide. Inner cities started their loss of population, tax-payers and economical activities. For Rust Belt inner cities this meant a double loss, not only on a physical level but also on a symbolic level because these cities didn’t even became a model for the new South-West cities like Los Angeles, Houston or Phoenix where the development followed exactly the rules of the “perfect suburban city”. It’s true that since the beginning most of the American cities have seen their suburbs growing with a higher rate than their inner loops, but the main reason that caused the complete emptying of inner city was the appearance of the massive car diffusion and the possibility also for workers to buy single-family houses. This took suburbs development to a further limit, from this moment there was no need to go to inner city neither to work, to buy or to have fun as it was before. The detached house, with the barbecue garden, became one of the most powerful images of the american “soft-power” (just remember Richard Nixon’s speech about the “American way of life” in front of Nikita Chruščëv at the American Exhibition in Moscow in 1959; he was inside a reproduction of a ranch-style detached house, perfect example of suburbia). Following, or helping, this movement federal policies on housing were concentrated on giving to all Americans their own detached house and lots of efforts were made to create the perfect image of the family living in the suburbia. The Federal Housing Administration raised their mortgages from 5 to 45 billion of dollars between 1940 and 1975 but, of course, opening a loan was not possible for everyone and for every type of building, only for new buildings in homogeneous areas or, in a practical way, only for suburban houses in “white” neighbourhoods. Adding to these policies the “National Interstate Highways and Defense Act” of 1956 (thought to build thousands of new roads and miles to help dispersion of population in case of atomic attack) “approached” lots of agricultural areas to the inner cities and made possible to them to become new suburbs.
Dramatic changes in social and racial composition of inner cities
Federal policies on mortgages caused an enormous change in the social and racial composition of population in the inner cities which nowadays it’s still one of the biggest problems of the shrinking cities. The phenomenon of white people moving to the suburbia is called by sociologists the “white flight” and the cause of this movement can be partially seen in the racial discrimination policies applied by Federal Housing Authority which granted 98% of all the mortgages to perfect “WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant)” families. Both reasons, escaping from violence and ugliness of inner cities and desire of a better way of life, are correct. Whatever are the reasons of white people movement is a fact that mortgages were not assigned to black and latinos families and that those families, without the possibility of going to the suburbs, started to “conquer” more and more space within downtown. Inside Detroit, for example, black population grew from 16% to 81% just in a couple of decades; and in Baltimore it grew from 24% to 63%. The positive aspect is that in lots of these cities black politicians and mayors gained the power, increasing the influence of black community in the American political system; but what they found to administrate in cities such as Gary, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago were only ghosts of what they were before. Black people moving to inner cities found themselves in a post-apocalyptic landscape where work and facilities were mirages. In the decade between 1970 and 1980 Detroit lost 89.000 manufacturing workers and “helping” this situation Nixon’s and Reagan’s republican federal governments cut many programs for health and social care to support what they thought was the “right” way of developing cities: mass suburbia. To understand how an American city was at that time the suggestion is to read Philip Roth’s novel “American Pastoral” where there is an interesting description of the city of Newark during the seventies with a precise description of its devastated environment. America has abandoned into the inner cities the poorest and the weakest of its citizens, black people with no qualifications, at the mercy of poverty and criminal gangs. Sociologists called the inner cities “hyper-ghettoes”, a new form of racial segregation born within America’s postindustrialization process. Following this continuous shrinkage unemployment in those cities became structural, not only factories but also shops, offices, small workshops closed. Sociologist William Julius Wilson (professor at Chicago and Harvard) said that society structure in those cities was literally liquefied; he proposed a new “holy trinity” of the underclass representing the inner cities: the “welfare mum” (a young single woman whose life depends on food stamps and other public care systems), the drug addicted and the ex-convict. “Edge cities” are the last degeneration of this movement; people could live and move within them to work or to find facilities without even see the inner city.
Today and after: “shrinkage culture” and future perspectives
With the 2008 sub-prime mortgages crisis also the Sun Belt stopped its growth and miles and miles of its suburban developments were seized by banks and insurances; what it’s incredible is that even in the Rust Belt foreclosures are increasing day by day, even if inner cities are right now more similar to post-apocalyptic ruins than to real cities. The house market in lots Rust Belt cities was drugged by mortgages and the sub-prime crisis meant another, even worse, stroke. Robert Beauregard, urban planning professor at Columbia University, make a distinguish between Rust Belt cities; based on those which succeeded somehow in a rebirth and those which are condemned to a continuous, maybe definitive shrinking. He defined as the “hard-core of shrinkage” those cities who have lost population for six consecutive decades and where the entire metropolitan (and sometimes also the suburban) area is involved in a process of shrinkage. In cities such as Youngstown or Detroit the unwavering myth of the perpetual growth of United States is leaving the place to doubts and questions; what if from ruins will not grew a city anymore? What is most impressive, though, is the answer that politicians and citizens are giving to these questions. Urban agriculture renaissance: a possible answer to shrinkage?
As said in the title in the second part of this paper I will discuss about one of the possible answers that people and institutions could give to the problem of shrinkage. Urban agriculture is meeting more and more supporters all over the world. An activity typical of “third world” cities is now becoming common and very fashionable for America’s population. The exact definition of what is urban agriculture is given both by FAO and CAST; they are quite different and give importance to different aspects of what is urban farming. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) urban agriculture is “an industry that produces, processes and markets food and fuel, largely in response to the daily demand of consumers within a town, city, or metropolis, on land and water dispersed throughout the urban and peri-urban area, applying intensive production methods, using and reusing natural resources and urban wastes to yield a diversity of crops and livestock”. This definition does not consider the role of urban agriculture in subjects such as health and food security policies which instead are included in the Council on Agriculture, Science and Technology (CAST) definition. This is the definition given by this consortium of scientific professors: “Urban agriculture is a complex system encompassing a spectrum of interests, from a traditional core of activities associated with the production, processing, marketing, distribution, and consumption, to a multiplicity of other benefits and services that are less widely acknowledged and documented. These include recreation and leisure; economic vitality and business entrepreneurship, individual health and well-being; community health and well being; landscape beautification; and environmental restoration and remediation.” We can say that Michelle Obama’s orchard on the back of the White House it’s “simply” a rediscovering of a typical activity of XIX century city. Around the year 1879 New York produced within its borders all the milk consumed by its inhabitants. It has been only during the XX century that
systems used for growing vegetables and animals inside the city were applied to the huge scale of Midwest plains. In 1893, for example, the mayor of Detroit launched the “potato patch program” to give the opportunity to unoccupied people to cultivate small pieces of land integrating public aids; in 1906 in Philadelphia more than 4.000 people worked in those orchards occupying 300 acres of land. The community orchards were used also for a didactic purpose, to prevent youth crimes and neighbourhood violence; the “black Friday” of 1929 gave a new boost to the growth of the orchards. After five years, in 1934, Federal Relief Administration calculated that there where 1.800.000 community orchards all around U.S.A., producing 47 million dollars of food value and 2.400.000 families depending on them for their daily amount of food; ten years after, in 1944, more or less 40% of overall fruits and vegetables needs of the entire country was guaranteed by those orchards. What happened to urban orchards and agriculture after the 2nd world war is connected to the big change in the American’s mind; by that time all the activities connected to them started to seem archaic and no more suitable for a rich capitalist country, as said by Mark Winne in his books. The first city that re-discovered the good practice of urban orchards was New York around the midseventies while being in the middle of a housing and social crisis that seemed with no exit. Today urban and collective farming in the zones of Bronx, Harlem and East New York is an important economical activity, supported by a well-organized system of volunteers, farmer’s markets and products trading. Recently in the city appeared lots of “ice-cream” small trucks selling fresh, local fruits and vegetables and the password “buy local” it’s becoming more and more common between residents. The beginning of the new urban farming season, New York, Lower East Side, spring 1974
Liz Christy,a young artist, was the first to use the word “guerilla gardener” to name herself and a group of friends who started to plant and grow flowers and trees within the vacant lots of her city. Soon after they established the first community garden of New York between the Bowery and Houston street; still alive there even if the area is one of the most expensive areas around the globe. Pioneers of urban farming had to overcome many obstacles to make their ideas successful; first of all avoiding and preventing acts of vandalism, finding new ways to remove ground pollution (like gardens in the brownfield, which means former industrial sites), the fact that public planning instruments are not “ready” to accept these activities, the opposition of speculative interests and also the opposition of people of neighbourhood. At the beginning the most difficult challenges were the struggle to raise funds, to establish strong relationships with local planner and community representatives and the division of the plots between people. In a few years the movement became more and more important and, again, the first cities that applied this idea for improving life quality were Rust Belt and old industrial cities, in search for all possible solutions for prevent shrinkage. Pioneering the road, New York city council launched in 1978 the “Operation Green Thumb”, the aim was to help whoever wanted to start an urban orchard by selling for a ridiculous amount of money public owned lots. By 1983 23% of green areas in New York was represented by those 410
urban orchards, involving 10.000 volunteers and occupying 143 acres of land. Few years later, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Horticulture Society and Penn State University launched the “Philadelphia green” program to give kits composed by soil, seeds and small tools to all inhabitants who ask for them. Within few years in the city there were more than 300 orchards, 220 gardens and hundreds of trees. Reagan era and the renewal programs, especially in cities like New York, Boston or Philadelphia caused the death of lots of these programs due to the increased value of land. Nowadays the green areas which have been able to survive to the worst period are knowing a new, even greater, renaissance; orchards are becoming proper farms and people are creating bigger networks of producers, sellers and buyers. Maintaining their educative functions by organizing courses, workshops and initiatives aimed to children and teenagers of the worst neighbourhoods these farms are moving one step forward to become proper “companies” self-sustained by selling their own products. East New York Farms association, for example, is managing two projects, “Garden of hands” and “Youth farm”, dedicated to young people of some of the worst areas of Brooklyn and it’s coordinating many other smaller orchards within the East New York area; they also manage a weekly farmer’s market to sell and exchange products grown in the city’s area. Why urban agriculture is so important, not only in an economical way?
To answer to this question there’s the need to introduce the problem of “food deserts” within America’s inner cities. People living in urban areas are “overpriced” and “underserved”, as said in many recent reports about social situation in the inner cities (in partiular: Overpriced and underserved: how the market is failing low-wage citizens, Job and Opportunities task force, Baltimore 2007). The statement of the reports is that living in an “urban ghetto” is more expensive than living in a middle-class neighbourhood; this is because, even if buying and renting houses requires less money, services such as shops, banks or insurances are more and more expensive than suburbs where, if it is not enough, incomes are higher. The market is far from being perfect and, according to this report, inner city families have to pay an average of 3.000 dollars more every year for a sort of hidden, sly “poverty tax”. In inner Detroit, for example, there are about 81 grocery stores and 131 financial services providers; of course not enough for a city with 700.000 inhabitants estimated; this also means that the average distance that a person living in the inner city must cover to reach shops or banks is 3-4 miles for stores and more or less 1 mile for banks (according to “Detroit Drilldown report”, Social Compact association, Detroit, 2009). In downtown Detroit the number of lenders has grown exponentially after 2008 crisis. Prices that citizens must pay to have services from this people are incredibly high, but often, for inner city inhabitants, lenders are the only choice they have because neither banks or insurances companies let them to open a bank account or an insurance policy. Even bank loans are more expensive due to “estimated credit risks” and “territorial rating” analysis based on people’s personal story and place of living. If you live in a city like Detroit or Cleveland your insurance will cost more because of higher risks of vandalic acts, robberies; because your house is probably older and in a bad state (in Baltimore insurance companies estimated that someone living in the
inner city will pay 424 dollars more for home insurance than someone living in suburbs). If it is not enough you will pay more for services like electricity or water supply. This is just a quick view of problems that are affecting inner cities inhabitants and some of the reasons why big supermarkets are abandoning inner cities condemning citizens to a even worse life. As an example I mention a report published by Mark Winne, a famous American scholar studying food policies and food market and former director of the “Hartford Food System”. According to him the city of Hartford lost, between 1968 and 1989, 12 supermarkets and in the mid-nineties there was only one big supermarket within the inner city (125.000 inhabitants). This is a common situation for many cities all around the United States. What is different from Europe is that in the United States “smaller is not always better” because small shops usually sell extremely-low quality goods and foods and they practically do not have any choice of fresh fruit or vegetables. The probability to have a good supermarket nearby is, for black and hispanic people, 50 or 60 per cent less than white people living in the suburbs. Following the leak of supermarkets within the inner cities there has been an incredible expansion of those little shops and fast food restaurants offering their “services” to poor, black people and to people depending on federal “food stamps”. Even if supermarkets of the “corporate America” are as big as small cities (5.000 square meters and 250 parking lots on average) space it’s not a problem within shrinking cities; the main problem is the lack of clients. It seems absurd that inner city residents do not have any possibility to eat healthy food if they do not cultivate by themselves vacant lots; or that the only supermarkets chain which sells biological and natural products in America is “Whole foods”, which is also one of the most expensive. According to the report “From poverty, opportunity: putting the market to work for lower-income families”, published by Brookings Institution and written by Matt Fellowes, poor families spend seven hundred dollars more than richer families each year just for buying food; this is not an economical problem, it is a matter of health and social justice. Again quoting Mark Winne, the real problem in the United States it’s not properly hunger, but what is called “food insecurity”; the “condition where people do not have a regular access to proper meals or do not know when will the following meal take place”. The dimension of the problem is again showed by data: in 2008 49 millions (17 million of children) of Americans were “food insecure” (12% of total population) or “severely food insecure” (4% of total population). How it is possible such a situation when federal government spend every year more than 45 billion of dollars in food and nutrition programs for poor people, children and school canteens? How it is possible that obesity, heart diseases and circulation illnesses are more common for poor people living in the devastated inner cities than for higher classes? There are of course many reasons to explain this apparent paradox, but two of them are particularly important. First of all, for people living in a condition of “food insecurity” the possibility to have money for a proper meal is an exceptional event; so this means that they will eat big quantities of unhealthy, fat and hyper-caloric food as soon they get the money or the federal food stamp and they will
eat nothing for the following days. The alternation of “eating” and “non-eating” phases is very dangerous, especially if you consider that during the “eating” phase you will eat “junk” food because it gives you more calories for less money. For this reason the incidence of obesity and heart diseases is lot higher for poor people than for middle-class people. In the United States 38% of black or Latin America people is in an obesity condition while the national average is about 23% and for white people is even less. Researchers of Chicago University created an particular index, the “food balance score” (FBS), to calculate the “food landscape” where you live. They divided the distance of the nearest supermarket per the distance of the nearest fast-food (for example if you have to travel four miles to reach a supermarket and two miles to reach a fast food your food balance score will be 2; obviously the higher it is the index the worst is the situation). Connected to this index there is the YPLL index (Years of Potential Life Lost). In Detroit 550.000 people live in areas where the FBS is higher than three and the YPLL is 64 years every 100 inhabitants (which means that each person lost almost a year of life just because the condition of the area). To have a better idea of what means living in a “food desert” the suggestion is to read “Closing the food gap” by Mark Winne, in this book he follows the life of Jeanette (a single black woman living in Hartford) and her attempts to reach the supermarket. It is a very good image of what is the meaning of living in a food desert. Other very important books about this topic are “In defense of food: an eater’s manifesto” and “The omnivore’s dilemma” both by Michael Pollan. These books are sort of bibles for urban farming activists, their description of the actual food production system and the descriptions of the “lunar” landscape of Midwest plains as a sort of apocalyptic landscape are the prerequisite for asking a radical change of the system. After the short presentation of what is the food situation in shrinking cities it’s easy to understand why the role of urban farming is so important and why architects, urban planners and policy makers should pay more and more attention to what is happening in Detroit. Considering the possibility to apply such strategies also to other cities imagining a different future for our society. Obviously urban agriculture it is not the only answer, but we must understand that we need to change completely our way of living and we must reconsider “old-fashioned” activities as a practical solution for some city’s problems.
Urban farming in Detroit: ideas, strategies, projects. Creativity and Technology
Before going deep into Detroit’ situation it could be useful a short description of two case-studies: New York and Philadelphia. These two cities were the first American cities that applied urban farming on a wide scale as a solution for some social and economical problems and I think it is useful having a look to them also to make a comparison with Detroit’ case. Case study number one: New York
In 1996 the “United Community Center” association did a research to identify strengths and weaknesses of East New York neighbourhood; what surprised them was that the sixty community gardens of the area were considered as the most important strengths of the neighbourhood. That’s why, starting by 2000, the association founded two proper urban farms, “Garden of Hands and Heart” and “Youth Farm”. The idea was to make the leap to make community gardens economically sustainable. Now in these farms they cultivate both traditional vegetables such as cherry tomatoes, aubergines, spinaches and typical ethnic vegetables; they make also honey and marmalade. They also produce the compost by themselves using organic garbage produced by the factories. In this place you can find together rich, white, liberal students and black or hispanic teenagers working on the various fields; although it should be said that exchanges between the two “communities” can be improved, it is very interesting to see such a mix of social classes. In a very segregated society like the American one this is an important experiment. Actually they started some programs to establish a sort of “non-white” leadership to run the farms and to follow the various health and nutrition programs in the area; to do that lots of young people of the area are involved in a sort of “hyper-glocal” (as said by Alessandro Coppola in his book Apocalypse Town) system of food production and distribution. Twenty-five young teenagers are involved in this project which is changing the entire life of the neighbourhood. It is also important because many immigrants come from agricultural areas and now they have the possibility to “recreate” their homeland environment and also to teach to young people how to cultivate and cook healthy food to create a virtuous circle. In 2008 there were more or less 200 volunteers working every month in the farms; the weekly market held by 30 sellers representing 50 community gardens has 17.000 visitors generating 150.000 dollars of income per year. Case study number two: Philadelphia
Another useful example to understand importance of urban farming in order to discover different cases before concentrating on Detroit is Mill Creek Farm in Philadelphia. In one of the worst areas of the city an “oasis” has grown in the last years. “Our food, our power” is the slogan of the initiative. Here immigrants, coming mostly from Caribbean region, cultivate, with biodynamic methods, fifty different types of vegetables. Also here the main problem for this farm is how to be economically sustainable because right now only 10% of the income is generated by selling products and the costs are still more than the incomes. Products prices must be kept low to make them accessible to people of poor neighbourhoods and for that reason farm’s leaders are trying to produce some special products (like creams or soaps) and sell them to richer inhabitants.
Another farm, called Greensgrow Farms, eighteen paid people work full-time to cultivate fruits, vegetables and flowers for the city’s restaurants and shops and for suburban middle-class people. Those value-added productions cover 80% of the costs so they have the possibility to cultivate fruits and vegetables for “poor” neighbourhood markets and sell them at low prices. In both these farms they are facing one of the greatest challenges for urban farming; the ability to offer products which are competitive with “normal” products not only for quality (which is obvious) but also for prices. What is happening in Detroit? Urban farming between activism and capitalism.
The choice of studying Detroit is made for a specific reason connected both to the particular situation the city is facing and to its very own way of developing urban agricultural strategies. The “Motor city”, as Detroit was called, faced in the past years a huge crisis which destroyed completely its physical and social structure; accentuated on a symbolic level by the fact that Detroit was more than a city, it symbolized the prototype of the company town, a sort of monument to the American industrial power. In this city the development of urban agriculture initiatives started later than New York but, as fast as the decline of the city, urban farming it’s already becoming something more than a social initiative to develop a new way of producing food and help people. In these days there is a debate between public institutions and city’s population on how promote and develop urban agriculture; it has been originated after the decision of Hantz corporation to establish within the city one of the biggest urban farms all over the world and the consequent fear of all urban farming movement that such initiative could become just another application of capitalistic model failing the main purposes of urban agriculture movement: introducing new ways of growing food with a low impact on the environment, improve the “buy local” movement and help people to have a better life quality by having better food. To understand the dimension of shrinkage in Detroit some data could be helpful; first of all Detroit has more or less 200.000 vacant lots on a total population of less than 800.000 people (declining from 951.270 to 713.777 inhabitants just between 2000 and 2010). The city is at the forefront for crime rates, food insecurity, poverty and has the lowest average income (25.000 dollars per year, half of the national average; considering also the suburbs because in the inner city the average income is 14.717 dollars per year) and the lowest rate of graduate people between US cities. The city council forfeited 5.000 acres (44.000 lots) of land within the inner city after the 2008 crisis and researchers of the Michigan State University (guided by professor Mike Hamm) found that by using void parcels as gardens and farms residents could harvest 75% of vegetables and 40% of fruit daily needs. According to financial experts keeping those vacant lots costs to public administration 12.000 dollars per lot every five years. Before concentrating on a particular proposal which has generated a strong debate within Detroit’s community I think could be useful to have a closer look to some other initiatives dedicated to urban farming and agriculture in the inner city. The first organization who started to apply similar initiatives is the organization called “Greening Detroit” (www.greeningdetroit.com), who started in 1989 apply a wide range of possible projects
trying to transform Detroit in a more sustainable city. They started by simply planting trees around the city parks to substitute trees lost with the expansion of the suburbs and they blossomed until including more than 15.000 gardeners working in more than a thousand gardens all around Detroit. Today the organization is no more working directly on the city but it has the ambition to become a sort of hub collecting all the different positive experiences and “showing them to the world”. Their advisory committee is composed of people coming from the most different fields and operating in sectors from LEED practice for housing, food security networks, sustainable mobility and so on. This is how they present themselves on the website: “We have been called “The big green umbrella” of information for one of the Largest Industrial Regions of the World!!! Not just a website, but an informational portal of synergies and opportunities. We’ve all heard the saying that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. Well we are proud to tell you that we’re starting to get to be known for “our left hand, knowing what their right hand is doing”. In December 2011 even Bank of America announced a donation of 200.000 dollars to help those initiatives. Inspired by the religious message of San Francesco d’Assisi is the Capuchin Soup Kitchen (www. cskdetroit.org), it has started with basic assistance to poor people such as meal distribution and psychological support, but now it is moving to the improvement of urban agriculture by establishing the “Earthworks Urban Farm”. This farm was “founded” in 1997 by one of the friars of the confraternity on a small plot near the kitchen and since then has grown to occupy 22 lots and cultivating 6.000 pounds of fruit and vegetables every year. Connected to this there is also a bakery to produce bread and sweets with local healthy products. This is an example of a social religious initiative, but there are many more examples of associations dealing with this. Established in 2005 the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, for example, is a coalition of organizations which, as the name implies, work with black community to ensure the access to healthy, local food; the expansion of co-operative policies and to encourage youth in studying food-related fields. Of course the community run an urban farm, located in the Westside of Detroit, called D-Town farm which occupies seven acres of land. These are just a couple of examples about what’s happening in Detroit to demonstrate how the civic society is vital and is trying to work daily for a better Detroit; but I will concentrate the last part of this paper on a single episode that is challenging the entire idea of urban farming. Michigan State University (MSU) projects and purposes
The local university was the first to imagine Detroit as the future capital of urban agriculture and in June 2012 this proposal became reality when the management approved a 1,5 million dollars plan to transform Detroit in a “world hub for food system innovation” and announced the agreement, called MetroFoodPlus Innovation Cluster, with the city mayor Dave Bing to join efforts of both administration, universities, associations and activists to develop this idea. MSU president, Lou Anna K. Simon, underlined the fact that by 2050 we need to double food production by using less energy and the best way to reach this goal is to apply global thoughts on a local scale (the idea of “think global and play local”). As said by Dave Bing: “we want to demonstrate that innovation based on metropolitan food
production can create new businesses and jobs, return idle land to productivity and grow more environmentally sustainable and economically vital city.” Dr. Richard Foster, fellow of the agricultural and natural resources college of MSU goes even forward by saying that this agricultural system will consider also the importance of health problems and will be also socially acceptable to solve racial justice problems. The university will create a demonstrative state-of-the-art site as a showcase for all the most recent discoveries in farming techniques like energy-efficient lights that provide plants with only the wavelengths they need to grow or special ecological treatments for polluted soil. Transforming Detroit in such an innovative hub is the first step to a general conversion of the city’s economy to innovative greening technologies; the purpose is to create a great number of qualified jobs in these fields and to attract more and more young people. To support this project the city council approved in July 2012 a proposal to build a 100 million dollars “urban-agriculture research centre” to demonstrate that city’s renaissance is possible (as reported by the Wall Street Journal). The Detroit Garden Resource Program is another initiative supported by local institutions which today, after seven years from the beginning, helps nearly 1.000 community gardeners “operating on scales ranging from tiny household plots with a few tomato plants and some cabbages to multilot gardens that feed many households”. Even MGM Grand starts to support associations with a one million dollars donation for downtown farming operations. It is impossible to know if this could be just the beginning of a proper revolution or just a “flash in the pan”, but for sure Detroit is tracing the way to a possible different future for American cities. Hantz Woodland proposal: the possibility of making history, or not?
The Hantz company, based in Southfield, near Detroit, is a medium-size corporation that operates in various sectors and it’s managed by it’s founder John Hantz. From 2009 Michael Score (who has a long and strong experience in farming technologies sector and has worked for many years in Africa) is the director of Hantz Woodland LLC, a parallel company founded to operate in the agricultural field and especially to support urban farming in Detroit. The idea is to transform Detroit into the largest urban farm in the world and to give back to the city its symbolic role to be reckoned with all over the world; of course not more as “Motor city” but as “Farming city”. The proposal is to create a 10.000 acres urban farm on the East Side nearby the river, transforming completely a huge part of the city. Just a curios fact to maybe understand better the interest of John Hantz in agriculture; he is the son of a former International Harvester worker and lived many years in the rural area of Romeo (Michigan) in the middle of fields. The first time John Hantz spoke about this idea was in April 2010, after a meeting with some experts from Michigan State University, and several discussions with Rick Foster, a food-policy expert of the Kellog foundation, who soon introduced to Mr Hantz the person who right now is “the public face” of the project, Michael Score. Thanks to him Hantz’s plan shrank from 10.000 to 200 acres and the company planned several meetings with local population to gain consent instead of simply buying lots and starting planting works. According to the news he tried also to buy lots in the suburban area in order to start immediately the agricultural production without waiting Detroit’s city council changing urban policies that do
not recognize urban agriculture as a possible activity within the city and the results of people’s meetings (www.mlive.com/business/detroit, 6th April 2010). Hantz Woodlands LLC planned to invest about 30 million dollars to buy vacant lots in Detroit and to transform them in a huge farm (it has been said that the first plan to cultivate 10.000 acres of land has never completely been abandoned by Hantz corporation); as written in the newspaper this will be the “largest private land sale in Detroit’ history” (www.voiceofdetroit.net, 10th December 2012) and the city council will earn 520.000 dollars for 143,8 acres of vacant lots. This means less than 10% of the, still low, average land price in Detroit; if it is not enough the costs of demolishing buildings on that lots will be covered partly by tax reduction and public aids to Hantz corporation, the project will create just few new jobs in the city (less than 200 within a decade) and Hantz will pay less than 60.000 dollars in taxes a year once the project will be developed (although it must be said that city council will have an extra gain by not spending money for public services in that areas). The community was strongly against this project, even if John Hantz said that the farm will have social purposes. According to Hantz Woodlands documents they “intend to develop the property for the purpose of planning and maintaining hardwood trees and conifers, and conducting such other uses as are or will be consistent with applicable law, regulations, and ordinances, including zoning.” As a demonstration in 2012 the company bought three acres within an almost empty neighbourhood and after the removal of all the debris (including 430 tires) they planted “hundreds of bur oak saplings”; the reaction of people living here was very positive, their sense of belonging increased a lot and this result is now used by Hantz’s supporter to demonstrate the necessity of the farming project. After the positive reaction of the population in this area the idea of Hantz corporation is to plant other 2.300 oak trees nearby to improve the quality of the soil and to have fast-growing products to sell to people (they planned to sell small oak trees to people for their gardens and to give trees that they cannot sell to wood factories once they have grown up). While continuing the lobbying process on institutions and population for the farm on the East River. Detroit “cannot create value until we create scarcity,” Mr. Hantz says. “Large-scale farming could begin to take land out of circulation in a positive way.” Large-scale farming could be a solution, but many residents claimed that the city council do not even let them to buy lots nearby their houses for farming purpose. The main criticism to the city council is that citizen’s proposals are not considered in order to help Hantz corporation in their project. Ironically the city council has just approved on 6th December 2012 an amendment to urban code which removed some limitations against urban farming and agricultural activities in the inner city. Danny Glover, an actor and activists who is spearheading the protest, asked instead, during a meeting at the Timbuktu School of Science and Technology on 8th December, to create a Community Land Bank Trust to allow people managing their own land. He ended his speech with a strong “declaration of war” against Hantz project by saying that “our truth cannot be denied, we have to get to work knocking on doors to bring people to the table. It is one moment in a long journey on which you (the people) will be the architects of your own destiny”.
Lottie Spady, activist of the East Michigan Environmental Council, said that the sell even “violates the City Charter and the State Constitution, because the land is set to be sold at an undervalued rate. There is no fair and transparent process by which the average citizen can purchase land, no community benefits agreement and no obligation expressed”. Even worst is the situation described by Linda Bane, activist of the Lower East Side Action Group; she had lots of meetings with Hantz corporation since 2010 but, despite the agreement, Hantz Woodlans left out of the loop more or less all the residents of the area; many of them do not even know what the plan will be or they have been prevented to buy lots by themselves to start cooperative projects and initiatives. The question of “food security” is brought up by Kwamena Mensah (Detroit Black Community Food Security Network), manager of the community D-town farm and strong defender of the role of selfdetermination of people living there, against what they consider a sort of “land-grabbing” like what is happening in Africa or South America (it could be just a coincidence that Mike Score spent four years in Zaire working on “agricultural development scheme”). The “conflict” between the company and the activists it’s going on and unexpectedly both the sides are trying to find a common ground for the sake of urban-agriculture development. I report a letter, written by Malik Yakini on March 2012 to John Hantz on behalf of Detroit Black Community Food Security Network (of whom Yakini is the director), Freedom Growers, Greening Detroit, The Boggs Center, People’s Kitchen, Andrew Newton and Stephen Boyle. The letter is published on www.foodfirst.org website and it’s an important document that shows how important is the “battle” which is going on in Detroit about the future of not only this city, but of many cities around the world. “Over the last few years, on the heals of the community-based urban agriculture movement, a new development has happened. Proposals for larger scale, for profit farming or forestry ventures have been presented to the City. Many of us have opposed those proposals because we think that their scale is inappropriate, and because they are not grounded in the social justice values that guide the current community-based urban agriculture movement. Certainly one thing that we all wish to see is that Detroit’s “vacant” lands develop greater value and be put to productive use. The details of how this land use happens are where our differences start. From our perspective, having large amount of land in the hands of any one person or corporation continues the centuries old legacy of inequity. We want to see the publicly owned land in the city of Detroit utilized for the common good. Land ownership provides the opportunity for wealth creation, community development, and pride. You have shared that your real objective in purchasing large tracts of land in Detroit is to create scarcity, and that the idea for Hantz Farms evolved only after your original idea of funding a homesteading office that would facilitate Detroit residents being able to acquire land did not gain traction with City officials. We think that this provides the opportunity for us to find common ground. We are asking that you drop your current proposal to purchase 1900 City owned lots to plant hardwood trees, and that we work together to develop an alternative proposal that allows Detroit residents to acquire ownership of land. The eyes of the nation are on Detroit. We have the opportunity to help create a new paradigm that
models cooperation between seemingly opposing forces. Rather than put our time and energies into a battle to discredit each other’s viewpoints, we could work together to create land use and ownership policies and practices that work in the best interest of us all. We would very much like to meet with you to discuss how we might cooperate for the common good.”
On 9th of August 2012 Mike Score answered the letter and again I report parts of this letter
“As we advanced our proposal for establishing Hantz Farms, through an enterprise we call Hantz Woodlands, we have continued to quietly promote the establishment of a homesteading program in Detroit. In addition to integrating advocacy for homesteading within our negotiations to establish a larger scale agricultural venture we found many allies who have agreed to work with John Hantz to advocate and help fund this type of work. Back in 2010 John Hantz publicly offered to work with a broad range of interest groups, including non-profit organizations, but many scoffed at the idea of partnering with the Hantz Group and rejected this invitation. At this point you have approached us with the interests in collaborating to create land-use and ownership policies/practices that work in the best interest of all. We have no interest in receding back into the negative relationships of the past, but we are not simply able to scrap the collaborative network that we have built for the purpose of pursuing a citywide homesteading initiative. Also our proposal for establishing Hantz Woodlands is based on agreements we’ve reached with dozens of block clubs and neighborhood associations on the city’s lower east side. Local residents have pinned their hopes on our venture for repurposing a large area area of cityowned blighted land. We are not able to set our agreements with our neighbors aside.” Activists replied that Hantz’s project it’s still on time to “drop his ill-conceived project and to change the course of history by cooperating with community activists to create a more just, equitable and vibrant Detroit.” A thought well-expressed by Patrick Crouch, manager of Capuchin Soup Kitchen Earthworks Urban Farm, when he said that “smaller farms fit within the fabric of a neighbourhood. A large commercial operation becomes a substitute for community redevelopment instead of being a catalyst for community redevelopment”.
The main point is that activists are searching not only a way to earn money and improve environmental situation in Detroit with urban farming, but they are trying to build a new society; urban-agriculture, food policies and greening strategies are the instruments to create a better city. They evaluate many other aspects which are beyond money and profits such for example the possibility to give to youth a good space to play and learn, the possibility of not paying for some products, or establish new relationships between people. It is a vision which has great consideration to the future, to the possibility for young generations to learn how to change their world and their society in a more equitable one. It is not only a matter of being economically sustainable, but also to be socially and environmentally sustainable. In the city there is of course enough space for both commercial and social initiatives, and what is said in this paper it is different from saying that “capitalistic” way of production cannot be applied to urban agriculture. As seen in Philadelphia there is the possibility to have in the same farm social and profitable activities, the possibility to produce some special goods to sell to richer people and use the earnings to produce “social” food for people who have less. It is just an example to refute critics saying that urban farming and all the connected proposals are a sort of springboard for a “communist” society where richness is the “absolute evil”.
The debate is still open and far from reaching a solution, if it exists, but it is gaining every day more attention and it’s becoming interesting for a wider range of experts and people and that is the main success of efforts made by activists. Talking only about Detroit the positive aspect of Hantz’s proposals is that they have shifted the debate on farming in Detroit on a further level. At the beginning the biggest fear of people and city officials was to be considered by outsiders as a “failed city” because of the demolition of lots and th reduction of the “city footprint”. While now urban farming future is taken for granted and the debate is moved on, the discussion is about how realize this greener future, how to put together health, food security, environmental sustainability, social integration and economical growth.
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www.detroit2020.com www.detroiblackfoodsecutiry.org www.foodfirst.org www.guardian.co.uk www.metromodemedia.com www.voiceofdetroit.net
Shrinking Detroit
Earth Works Farm
Hantz Woodland
Detroit black community food security network