Alterurbanism: Social Hope and the Post-Industrial City

Alterurbanism: Social Hope and the Post-Industrial City

By Chad Rochkind

TABLE OF CONTENTS VARIATIONS ON THE THEME OF FREEDOM 3 THE FALL AND RISE OF INDUSTRY 9 SPECTRES OF ALTERURBANISM 15 ALTERURBAN DETROIT 31 ALTIORA PETIMUS 40 END NOTES 42 BIBLIOGRAPHY 44

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Variations on the Theme of Freedom

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“New forces, new cravings, new aims, which had been silently gathering beneath the crust of reaction, burst suddenly into view�1

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I introduce this thesis with the same quotation that opened Ebenezer Howard’s seminal text of practical utopian planning, Garden Cities of Tomorrow.2 I do this, of course, by design: to emphasize the similarities between Howard’s time and ours, and also to pay homage to the storied tradition within which this thesis hopes to place itself. Many a great mind traversed this terrain long before I arrived in this life, and many, many more dreamed of a better world than the one they were given. From Plato's Republic to the utopian visions of the Modernist architects, the ideal form of a city—the kind that provides maximal happiness for its inhabitants—has been put forth in almost every generation.

However, this text is not a vision of utopia, and given the track record of other attempts, probably for the good. The problem with utopias, after all, is that people have to live in them. Humans are fickle folk— characters of ever-shifting wants and needs that never seem to settle in a satisfying equilibrium for a stable period of time. The grand schemes of utopia's architects crumble at the foundation as a result of a change in human circumstances, a slight shift in the driving forces of the day, or a blind spot of reason that results from time-based cultural biases at the outset. Lived experience, for humanity, is thus a constant ebb and flow between opposing poles of its own subconscious.

According to Francoise Choay, the philosopher of urbanism, attempts at creating ideal cities take on two forms throughout history: the Rule and the Model. The Rule is urban planning based on a set of regulations that govern acceptable settlement forms within cities, such as smog controls, congestion charges, and building height restrictions. Thus, the Rule is the banal collection of bylaws and ordinances that constitute the day-today slog of city governance. The Model, on the other hand, is a proposed ideal form of city life to which humanity should strive. It is Utopia. It is Shangri La. It is future drive, exciting, and seductive. Yet in practice it is never actualized, except as a nightmare.3 So this thesis is not a utopian Model, nor should it be. It is, rather, the study of the seeds of utopia and other forms of social hope that exist already within the amorphous social form we call cities. If there is anything novel here, it is in the recognition of a common thread that unites seemingly unrelated urban forms of life, and the particular benefits these might have for revitalizing the post-industrial city as it adjusts to a new historical era.

Yet even these pockets of utopia have been present since humans started to erect their mass settlements.

Perhaps most notably in recent history are the legendary Parisian cafes of Howard's time.4 In these spaces, social rank and class collapsed, and an uninhibited spirit of creative energy and a free flow of information led to some of the most world shattering art and ideas our civilization has ever known. I sense the same uninhibited spirit today, as we burrow ourselves firmly into this millennium—though in forms unique to our new historical circumstances.

Of course, at first, this was only a matter of intuition. I could feel the “new forces, new cravings” pulse in my bones like a radio wave—most acutely after the collapse of the global financial system in 2008. Friends, acquaintances, and like-minded city dwellers seemed to feel the same thing. Almost overnight, in the midst of the rubble of our economy, new methods of interacting and doing business with one another seemed to sprout simultaneously at the grassroots level. Suddenly, the world was full of food trucks, pop-ups, small business incubators, crowd sourced public art, urban farms, and various other phenomenon that I will document throughout this paper.

As I pursued the subject further, I began to notice the links between these disparate forms of urban life. They 5

seemed to be critiques of business as usual: a kind of urban monoculture, as it were, defined by top down approaches to development and planning based on the dictates of modernism. But in addition to being critiques, they were also lived alternatives that were grasping to form the basis of a very different kind of urban future.

The financial crisis was only one element in the equation. Equally important was the rise of the internet.

Networked culture allowed for best practices to be proliferated across the globe in an instant. A global urban community was formed right at the moment the world population crossed the threshold to become a majority urban. This sudden urbanization began to change the size and form of cities, so as to constitute something wholly new: the metropolis.

This new metropolis was all consuming—impossible to walk across in a day like the ancient city state or medieval walled city before it. And also, because of mass media and the internet, its cultural affects extended the metropolis' reach far beyond its physical borders.

The change of urban form provided unique opportunities for exchange, but it also became the site of global anxiety. This was the result of the tension arising between urban and rural practices, and between the use of new construction and the creation and/or reuse of urban ruins. The tension also manifested in the space between what could be bought and sold as property and what constituted our common inheritance, both physically in the city's plan and culturally in its creative production. Simultaneously, the market economy which had come to be the dominant form of social organization found a new challenger in the form of the network. But perhaps most significantly, the tension arose out of the belief on both sides that the metropolis was the battleground in the war between the forces Empire and the global Multitude.

It is out of this ferment—times as tumultuous as the early industrial age—that alterurbanism emerges. The formulation of this term derives from the thinking of the political philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.5 As such, this thesis is situated within the framework of Hardt and Negri’s concept of altermodernity, and seeks to fill the gap in their work by analyzing specific urban dynamics. The metropolis, as we shall see, is central to their ideas about how our present historical era operates, yet until now the forms of that fabric remained uninvestigated through an altermodern lens. Thus, alterurbanism can be viewed as the social, political, spatial, and ecological elements of the city within the context of altermodernity.

This altermodern era is defined by the rise of three forms of globalization that challenge the standard neoliberal notion that globalization is directly equated with unfettered free-markets. There is an alterglobalization6 at work as well: an awakening of a consciousness of global peoplehood, a rise in global technologies that link people in social networks, and an awareness of the Earth as a global system of ecology.

Both alterurbanism and altermodernism pursue a diagonally oppositional stance by refusing to engage in a direct dialectical struggle with the dominant forms of power. For both, the creation of alternatives is just as important, if not more so, than critique. In this way, alterurbanism and altermodernity contain a pragmatic political strain in the spirit of Richard Rorty.7 Rorty argued that with the rise of postmodernism and the emphasis on identity (rather than class) politics, progressive forces gave up the reins of power in order to stand on the sidelines as critics of power and referees of political correctness. A rightward trend in America ensued. The entire notion of the nation 6

became defined by the crudest form of nationalism rather than the more nuanced and abiding love of country found in the tradition of Jefferson, Emerson, Whitman, and Dewey.

Politics is a game of capture the flag. Whoever defines the national symbols around his own ideals is the winner. As such, this thesis aims to reinvigorate civic engagement at all levels, by highlighting disparate but already existing forms of alternative urban life so that they may better understand the philosophical, political, and social forces that link them. Further, I will propose more flexible institutional models of governance and social interaction, and present ways in which the cities of the United States can play a fundamental role in progressive change, while simultaneously aiming toward a more globally connected future. Rorty bemoaned the progressive retreat from the institutions of civil society. Following this thinking, alterurbanism and altermodernism not only engage institutions, but reshape them to meet new needs, and create them where there is a vacuum.

Alterurbanism also emerges from a spirit of revival. This is evidenced by its advocacy of rural practices within the boundaries of the metropolis, by its utilization of crafts and DIY spirit, and also through its insistence on the re-use of urban ruins. For altermodernism this spirit of revival derives from its reinvigoration of postcolonial cultures.

Where alterurbanism diverts from altermodernism is in its direction of resistance. Whereas altermodernism resists and replaces modernism, alterurbanism makes no such claim. In fact, many of the tensions alterurbanism seeks to relieve have roots in modernist thought. After all, the modernists, too, were utopian in their own way, seeking the proper balance between urban and rural, and all the other opposites that were in tension in their day.

Thus, altermodernism is the era immediately following post-modernism, but rather than defining its relationship to modernism through detachment and irony, altermodernism engages modernism through critique and alternatives, resistance and utopias. Altermodernism is not an epoch changing era, per se. It is an era of incubation in which the forms of life of a future society are tested. This future is by no means inevitable, but alterurbanism attempts to create a mesh of urban experience that could one day solidify into a new societal foundation. Altermodernism and alterurbanism take seriously Buckminster Fuller’s proclamation that “you never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.�8 This is precisely the method of alterurbanism today, just as it was the method the modernists utilized in their own time.

Yet, in their attempts to create a better world, the modernists left us the ruins of reinforced concrete and a culture of alienation. And this should serve as a warning to any and all utopians today: too often, to reverse the axiom, the application of reason produces monsters.

The downfall of modernist planning was in its position of command from the top down. Master urban planners, hero architects, and institutional real estate developers razed entire neighborhoods and reshaped whole cities as if their designs existed in isolation like they did in the sketches on their cocktail napkins. If the future is to be better, more humane, compassionate and sustainable, then this kind of thinking needs to be reversed. We must channel the strength of individual communities and form institutions that allow ideas to emerge from the bottom up. If not, we will leave our children with the same ruinous society that our parents left us.

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Of course, the possibility of some future failure is no reason not to dream. And in these times of economic strife, ecological collapse, and cultural panic, it is impossible not to dream a little and put a bit of utopia into practice, if only to maintain our sanity and any semblance of social hope.

Thus the alternative forms of urban life that exist today could be described as variations on the theme of freedom. As the old models crumble before us, and as the power structures that support them lose their legitimacy, individuals in the streets are expressing an almost primal urge for liberty. While the Occupy Movement and various other urban encampments are certainly the most visible manifestation of this urge, it also springs up in other, less confrontational forms.

What follows is the documentation of the philosophical underpinnings and practical application of alterurbanism. Special emphasis will be given to the post-industrial city as the future domain of an alterurban society that can reconcile the preexisting dialectics of urban:rural, market:network, empire:multitude. The reasons for this shall soon enough be clear. In the meantime, it is important to recognize that alterurbanism is not the struggle between existing dialects, but rather, their reconciliation in practice. In this way, alterurbanism is the practice of hybrid creation, in the sense that an urban farm is neither exclusively urban nor rural, but both. Other hybrids exist already in alterurbanism, and even more are possible.

An additional note: the case of how best to handle the urban practices of the developing world was something of a dilemma. While the rapid urbanization and largely unregulated urban situation there provides unique contexts for urban experimentation worthy of its own study, I have elected instead to weave examples of alterurbanism in the developing world within the broader thesis. A separate section, it seemed to my view, would be Eurocentric and set up a situation in which my urban brethren of the global city were otherized. I wanted to emphasize the communality of urban struggle, and I didn't want to represent a paradigm in which achieving the Western model would be considered the only metric of progress. The developing world is full of diverse cultural practices that are being put to the test in new urban circumstances. It is out of these practices and the organic struggle to find new forms of life that the urban future of the developing world should come into being, not out of some Western colonial hangover belief that we have perfected progress and have the right to impose our way of life on others. Tragically, our imperial mindset prevents us from learning the lessons of resourcefulness and community engagement that exist there.

If we had all the answers the struggle wouldn't continue in the streets of the Western world.

The city is at all times the site of celebration and hope, oppression and fear. What follows are the efforts of the hopeful—that ageless band of dreamers who have found form throughout the millenia in order to usher in a newer, fairer world.

What follows is the future.

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The Fall and Rise of Industry

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“People forget that Icarus also flew.”9

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In the yellowing photographs and faded film reels the city thrusts ever-upward; its towers lined like giant soldiers in the ranks of an army called progress—heroic high-rises stretching to the sky. A vast system of roads and expressways surges to the center like arteries in the service of a throbbing heart. The populace pulses. The human hordes hum. The intricacy of the city’s component parts is as elegant and powerful as a motor. There is ample green space here. There’s a fine Victorian townhouse for you to live in at the outer edges. This is the city in its full bloom: the embodiment of the dreams of its age.

Yet the age is not our own. The dream became a nightmare.

See the skyline half-abandoned. The downtown towers in disrepair; the cracked windows, the boarded up doors. See the six-lane streets of lonely cars; the city core as quiet as a cavern. The motor sputtered out here some time ago. The green space since became a vacant lot. The townhouse, a burnt out crack-den.

This is Detroit in 2012. City of non-place. City of junkspace. City of ruin.10 We start here because Detroit serves as an exemplar of the life-cycle of cities of the modernist mold as they transmuted into post-modernism. It also represents their potential for rebirth as we enter the altermodern era defined by globalization of culture, governance, and ecological awareness.

More specifically, Detroit is a microcosm for the cultural journey taken by cities tied almost exclusively to economies of the Industrial Revolution: boom to bust, bust to ruin. It’s the same pattern you find in St. Louis or Youngstown, Manchester or Liverpool. Yet in its current anomalous state, Detroit also presents unique opportunities for innovation and experimentation in the realm of alternative forms of urban life and cultural production—should the city choose to seize the moment. To put it another way, based on various global, political, and cultural trends, Detroit is uniquely situated to become an alterurban dynamo if it can learn the lessons of bottom-up urban experiments that are already taking place across the globe and coalesce them in strategic spaces. If the city succeeds in doing so, it can serve as a model for urban development that largely mitigates the negative impacts normally associated with gentrification.

But before we walk the road to the future, we must first travel the terrain of the past. ***** In its heyday, they called Detroit the Paris of the Midwest. During World War II and its immediate aftermath Detroit was considered “the arsenal of democracy”. It was the very pinnacle of the industrial economic might that propelled the United States to Superpower status after the war.

Today, Detroit often tops the list of most dangerous cities in America. In 2008, Forbes named Detroit America’s Most Miserable City and asked its readers to “imagine living in a city with the country's highest rate for violent crime and the second-highest unemployment rate. As an added kicker you need more Superfund dollars allocated to your city to clean up contaminated toxic waste sites than just about any other metro.

Unfortunately, this nightmare is a reality for the residents of Detroit.”11 Today, the city is more commonly associated with ruin porn than with economic and cultural vibrancy that were once its hallmarks.

How did the city reach such heights, and what factors led it to fall to such quick and total despair?

The history of Detroit and its built environment is the history of industrial America, in which the politics of industrial economy and race took a leading role shaping the city’s spatial layout and the social relations that were embedded within it. While “Detroit’s brooding horizon of factories and its masses of industrial laborers 11

became icons of modernity”12, they also reflected an undercurrent of class conflict and racial divide that modernism obscured and perpetuated.

The plan for Detroit was originally designed by Augustus B Woodward and Governor William Hull in the fashion of Pierre L’Enfant’s neoclassical design of Washington DC. Arterial avenues allowed easy access into and out of downtown and bisected curved roads like spokes in a giant wheel. But as small scale manufacturing gained traction in the late 19th Century, a checkerboard grid was imposed upon the outlying open land that allowed for connectivity between factories, warehouses, and workshops. This easily replicable grid system also allowed for rapid city expansion.

Between 1910 and 1920, with the rise of the auto-industry, Detroit nearly doubled its population from 465,766 to 993,078 to become the fourth largest city in the United States. The population peaked at nearly 2,000,000 by 1950, bolstered by a nationwide post-war economic boom, the introduction of the Interstate Highway System, and a youth driven optimism of America largely embodied by the automobile.13 During the height of industrialization, 60% of Detroit’s industrial jobs were auto-related—either through direct employment of the Big Three auto manufacturers at massive factories like the River Rouge or Packard Plant, or through the indirect association of auto parts suppliers. The remaining 40% of industrial jobs were concentrated in furniture manufacture, aircraft part fabrication, salt mines, steel mills, and garment makers.

This produced a total industrial landscape that incorporated every imaginable product and process into its vast tapestry. During World War II, the industrialists converted their operations to the production of military hardware.

Thus, Detroit was the backbone of the economic and military might that pulled the US out of the Great Depression—an economic meltdown that was caused largely by the transition from an agricultural to industrial economy. Later, Detroit was the victim of the outsourcing of labor and a nationwide shift to a service based economy.

As the home of the mighty United Auto Workers union, Detroit was also the Mecca for organized labor, which ensured that laborers received a middle class income through a process of strikes and protests that began in the 1930s. As such, the large middle class made its imprint on the built environment of the city.

The single-family detached home was the most common residential structure, representing two-thirds of Detroit’s building stock. This form of housing reflected working class sensibilities and aspirations, but it also planted the seed of sprawl that would help cause the city’s downfall. It was also the kind of urban form that caused Jane Jacobs to remark as early as 1961 that “Detroit is largely composed, today, of seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure.”14 At the time only 1.3% of the city’s residential structures were apartments, and the neighborhoods themselves were zoned for single use, creating large swaths of placeless residential land whose sole purpose was to serve the factories. Though not state sanctioned, segregation was rampant.

Wealthy industrialists made their homes in mock-French chateuxs, neo-Tudor and neo-Georgian mansions, and New England style colonials in the outlying neighborhoods of Boston-Edison, Palmer Woods, and Rosedale Park. Meanwhile, the working class lived in small frame-construction bungalows closer to the core.

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Whereas the city was segregated in part by class, race was still the overarching segregating factor in spatial relations outside of the factory.

All throughout the industrial boom, African Americans migrated north to escape Jim Crow and to find the promise of middle class prosperity. Yet upon arrival in Detroit they were met by racist real estate agents who funneled them out of white neighborhoods and pigeonholed them into homogeneous ethnic enclaves.

Restrictive housing covenants by homeowner associations barred black ownership in working class white neighborhoods and furthered the force of segregation. This, despite the fact that 50% of the nation’s black auto laborers were employed by a single company—Ford—and were largely concentrated at a single factory: River Rouge. And while organized labor called for the end of discrimination in hiring practices, blacks were still given the dirtiest and most dangerous industrial jobs in the form of janitorial services and working the furnaces.15 Further, since African Americans were coerced into settling specific areas of the city, and since there were fewer homes available in black sections than there were potential buyers, the simple law of supply and demand dictated that houses in African American neighborhoods were more expensive than their white working class counterparts. To make matters worse, house prices remained higher than whites’ despite shoddier build quality that required constant maintenance. So even if the labor movement succeeded in establishing equal employment and wages, the reality of the built environment contributed to widening the gap of affluence between working class whites and blacks. African Americans had to pay more to live.

This gap was perpetuated by post-war modernist planning, as cross-city freeways like Chrysler and John C. Lodge cut black neighborhoods in half. The construction of the freeways became a convenient pretext for socalled slum clearance and leveled entire swaths of the city in predominately black neighborhoods. All told, over 5000 residential units were demolished for freeway construction, and African American homeowners were left high and dry—unable to sell the condemned property and use the money for a new home purchase.

So unlike the south, racism and segregation weren’t institutions of the state in Detroit. Rather they were embedded into the mechanisms of the market and the republic of property, and were advanced by the subtle manipulation of racial-spatial relations through modernist planning and so-called slum clearance. Racial tensions brewed for decades until they reached a crescendo in the riots of 1967.

And the city burned.

White flight ensued, as the Caucasian working class fled the city core to the peripheral suburbs. Today, much of Detroit is plagued by blight, as “over ten thousand houses are uninhabited; over sixty thousand lots lie empty, marring almost every city neighborhood.”16 While the city population shrank to 713,777, the surrounding Metro region held fast at a population of 4,296,250, a size that has more or less held constant for six decades. As such, the depopulation of Detroit should not be viewed as a massive migration out of the region for better prospects elsewhere in America. Rather, Detroit’s urban exodus has largely taken the form of movement from the city to its suburbs.

Whereas the post-industrial city was the greatest beneficiary of boom-time modernity, it was also the greatest victim of industrial collapse at the onset post-modernity and the dawn of globalization. By the time Nixon went to China, Detroit was on the downswing. By the fall of the Iron Curtain, Detroit was already in ruin.

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What was left of the once mighty middle class of industrial workers was swept away by free trade agreements like NAFTA. David Harvey, the Marxist social theorist, views the transition from modern to post-modern city as one whose planning transforms from “large-scale, metropolitan-wide, technologically rational and efficient” to one that is characterized by “fiction, fragmentation, collage, ecclectism, all suffused with a sense of ephemerality and chaos.”17 Detroit was no exception.

From the 1970s to the early aughts, urban renewal in Detroit was defined by the construction of the fortresslike Renaissance Center, two downtown sports stadiums, and three casinos, all of which created islands of experience with very few connective ties and almost no spill over effect to the surrounding neighborhoods.

This is where Detroit stands today. A city of large-scale projects and disconnected pockets of post-modern ecclectism and kitsch. This is the landscape from which alterurbanism emerges. Whereas modernism was driven by a utopian social vision and post-modernism by aesthetics that were not necessarily socially oriented, alterurbanism takes design to be in the service of socially conscious shock actions. Will this new form of urban development reinvigorate Detroit?

Plagued by crime, vacancy, and government policies that were ineffective to stem the tide of degradation, Detroit traveled the great arc from modern optimism to post-modern despair. But is something new emerging? In the face of such staggering obstacles that were compounded even further by the Great Recession and foreclosure crisis, could there possibly be reason for hope?

Why, you might ask, should one be fond of fallen things?

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Spectres of Alterurbansim

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“A city is a place that can offer maximum freedom. Otherwise it’s incomplete.”18

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History is not a straight line that moves forward into the future without fail. It is instead the persistent perpetuation of cycles: High, Awakening, Unraveling, Crisis, and High again.19 Civic institutions form, solidify, corrupt, and crumble based on the economic and social forces that shape them. This theory of history, put for by William Strauss and Neil Howe in the Fourth Turning, is a good way of understanding why history seems to repeat itself again and again. In their view, the arc of history is defined by generational relations and struggles based on the excesses and overreaches of various generational archetypes20. According to Strauss and Howe, the generation emerging today—the generation that is fueling alterurbanism—fits within the Hero archetype characterized by the collective endowment of community, affluence, technology and the creation of new civic institutions after the social upheaval of the Crisis.

Likewise, in this view, the fate that befell Detroit is neither a surprise nor unique to southeast Michigan.

Rather, it is part of a much broader, global and historical trend. Its rise, fall, and rebirth perfectly positioned within the timeline of the turnings.

As the West moved away from an industrial-based economy, echoes of Detroit’s downfall spread across the world—from the blighted parts of bright-light global cities to the black holes of the global economy in the developing world.

All of this occurred at a time of unparalleled rapid urbanization. In this regard, May 23 2007 might be the single most significant day in recent human history. On that day, according to researchers at NC State and the University of Georgia,21 we went from a species that spent 200,000 years living in the wilderness, to a species that was now a majority urban. So, while Detroit’s population bled for decades, other cities—some of them completely new—experienced growth at warp speed.

This is the geographical context of alterurbanism, one in which humans are forced to redefine how society governs itself, how individuals interact with one another, and how humanity relates to nature within the milieu of a newly urbanized world.

We are currently in the era of Crisis: a period of secular upheaval defined by seemingly endless war and economic meltdown, in which new social values replace the regime of the old civic order. New institutions based on new aspirations are being born or are in their infancy. These new institutional forms are what constitute alterurbanism.

For the purpose of philosophical and practical analysis, I have divided alterurbanism’s aspirations into three distinct city types—City of Multitude, Gaia City, and Network City—though in practice, alterurbanism seeks to be all at once.

City of Multitude “The metropolis is to the multitude what the factory was to the industrial working class.”22 Sometime toward the end of the 20th Century, the city replaced the factory. That is to say that within altermodernity, the metropolis is now the dominant site of production, oppression, and revolt. But who are the oppressors and revolutionaries, and what, exactly, is the city producing? In order to answer these questions, we must pull the lens back beyond the confines of city borders and investigate how power is structured globally.

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From the middle of the 20th Century to the beginning for the 21st, a seismic shift in international governance occurred. A new network of power began to rule the globe with the establishment of the International Monetary Fund in 1944, the foundation of the G6 (now the G8) in 1975, the creation of the World Bank in 1989, as well as the systemic disintegration of national boundaries that occurred over the course of the past half-century as a result of free trade agreements and the emergence of transnational corporations and other supra-national organizations. The traditional sovereignty of the nation-state was sidelined, regardless of its form. Representative democracies, autocratic dictatorships, and states governed by theocratic mullahs all became aristocrats in the court of a new monarch: Empire.23 In this new system of sovereignty, no single power holds complete sway, and neither can a lone actor be held accountable for the actions of the network. In the face of Empire, even the supposed hegemony of the American superpower proves to be illusory. If anything, America’s inability to go it alone proves that power is much more dispersed and interconnected globally than ever before. In this sense, Anti-Americanism is not only an inaccurate portrayal of global power, but also a distraction from the fight against Empire.

The new global power arrangement requires that the various international actors that make up this network compete and cajole in order to realign the balance of power depending on shifting circumstances. This competition can be (and is) exploited by the actions of the revolutionary class. Further, because the network is unaccountable to the average citizen, domestic politics is defined by a crisis of representation in which people are unable to shape policy through official institutional mechanisms. In America, this is reflected by a steady decline in satisfaction with the system of government and how well it works. In 2002, only 26% of Americans were unsatisfied with the system. By 2011, dissatisfaction rose to 58%.24 People do not feel that the government works for them.

Likewise, this new sovereign of Empire produces a new subject: the Multitude. Whereas the industrial age produced the factory worker as the icon par excellence of labor in its era, when power shifted upward into the hands of a decentralized global network, the numbers of the subject class greatly expanded to encompass everyone not at the very top. Further, the new global Multitude transcends traditional class distinctions. It is “composed of a set of singularities...a social subject whose difference cannot be reduced to sameness.”25 The swarm of the city streets, and its creation of various cultural products that make up lived experience within the metropolis, are the product of Multitude. The Occupy Movement crystallized this new class and helped call it into being with the battle-cry: “We are the 99%.”

As the site of production, the city is now a contested space between the forces of Empire and the forces of Multitude. It is no surprise that the global uprisings that occurred throughout the world in 2011 were an almost exclusively urban phenomenon. These were not peasant revolts, but pedestrian ones. The entire praxis of urban experience is a manifestation of this struggle: from the abstract economies around which the city organizes itself to the material brick and mortar (or more often glass and steel) of the city's built environment.

Urbanism is the city of Empire. Alterurbanism is the city of Multitude.

This is a global phenomenon with blurry, ever-shifting borders. There is no urban city and there is no alterurban city, but rather, enclaves of each exist within every metropolis. Financial districts and luxury condos on one hand—bohemian neighborhoods and squatter collectives on the other. As such, “you find the first world in deepest Africa and in the republics of Central Asia, just as you find the Third World in big European or American cities”26. Empire is not the sole domain of the West, nor is the Multitude confined to 18

the harsh realities of the developing world.

In fact, the altermodern era can be defined by the introduction in the West of a level precarity common within the global South. High unemployment rates, the normalization of free-lance labor, and highly mobile workforce are the new norms within global cities.

The developing world itself is the black hole of Empire—with oppression outsourced to the outskirts of dominant society. Yet community resourcefulness, coupled with a state of social precariousness and lack of regulation, have led to some inventive bottom-up solutions to community problems. The Integral Urban Project in Caracas, Venezuela is an excellent example of the power of the global Multitude to solve social problems far better than Empire through community engagement and novel design solutions.

The city of Caracas is located at the bottom of a valley, and informal settlements slope up either side. These slums have a history of drug violence and gang warfare. The architects of Proyectos Arquie5 came to Caracas and consulted with the community about their needs and assets. It was determined that the vertical orientation of the slums which was often considered a community liability could be transformed into its greatest asset. A well designed and colorful staircase and pathway system was established to link formally disconnected areas and improve access to the city center. Average commutes dropped from one hour to ten minutes. Additionally, the staircase was used to integrate electricity, drainage, sewer, gas, and water services— in addition to creating new public spaces—which improved living conditions in the informal settlements.

This made the neighborhood a place people wanted to be, and because of the decreased commute time, a place where they could be more often. Social cohesion ensued, crime dropped, and gang violence ended almost entirely.27 This example has many lessons for Detroit. The best way to combat crime and degradation is by creating a better platform upon which a community can realize its ideals. Through an improved public realm and the various social connections that happen as a result, designers working in conjunction with the community are able to accomplish what the police cannot. Rather than focusing on police tactics, Detroit should create welldesigned places that encourage community. Rather than funnel all of its public money to stadiums and casinos28, more funding should be given to improve the public realm and infrastructure of poor neighborhoods. This is a more financially efficient means of combating crime, because it decreases the need for intense police presence.

Further, the Integral Urban Project showed the way in which alterurbanism reconfigures the role of the architect and urban planner. The successful approach is not given from the top down. The architect doesn’t impose a solution based on utopian fantasies. Rather a bottom-up solution—one in which the architect is a facilitator of community goals, and uses his expertise to make those dreams a tangible reality—is the one best suited to the needs of our times.

So now that we have identified the oppressors (Empire) as well as the revolutionary class (Multitude), the Caracas example makes the object of production a little clearer: the city is its own product.

The shift from an industrial economy based on the production of material objects to an informational economy based on the production of subjective products such as financial services, the software side of the tech sector, and products of culture greatly altered the city’s relationship to the broader economy. The metropolis transformed from the ultimate market externality that tangentially benefited the industrial 19

economy by grouping workers and managers together in space—as it had done in boom-time Detroit—to the all-encompassing factory and receptacle of its own production.

The struggle between Empire and Multitude boils down to how value is appropriated across this broad field of subjective production. Is the city for sale, or is the city the common inheritance of all of its inhabitants?

When value is created, who keeps it? These questions are at the heart of the injustice of gentrification.

Take, for example, what the fate of the Paper Swan Loft in Bushwick, Brooklyn illustrates about value creation within cities. A group of artists moved into an old factory space in a largely abandoned part of Brooklyn in 2007. At the time, most young artists were flocking to Williamsburg, and distant Bushwick was considered to be off the beaten path, even dangerous. Soon these artists created a venue space that showcased local talent. They also housed traveling acts. A whole community of poets, painters, and musicians formed around the space, and more and more people came to Bushwick, and many decided to live there.

While this was happening, other artists that were completely disconnected from the Paper Swan Loft also began to move Bushwick. The neighborhood quickly became hip, and the landlord of the factory was able to rent out space to young professionals. With their arrival, the activities of the Loft were put to an end. The landlord forbade any further shows at the request of the new arrivals. With a hip image and peace and quiet in the building, the landlord was able to raise rent for newcomers, and now there is immense pressure on the initial artists of the Paper Swan Loft to be forced out.

But why did the rent raise in the first place? The landlord himself barely lifted a finger, and the structure of the building remained unchanged. So who created that extra value that the landlord was able to capture in the form of rent?

The answer, of course, is the artists of Paper Swan.

As the old saying goes, the most important factor of real estate value is location, location, location. By creating a spirit of bohemia, the Paper Swan Loft helped change Bushwick’s reputation. The location went from derelict to desirable. Demand for housing increased. As a result, the value of the Paper Swan Loft’s cultural creation was appropriated by the landlord.

Thus, the basis of Empire’s power is disembodied private ownership of property: the ownership of land by anyone other than its inhabitants and the ownership of the means of production by anyone other than those who work it. Empire operates through abstract investments in material spaces and products. It strengthens itself through a process of continuous enclosure and profitization of common domains for the enrichment of the few.

In today’s urban configuration, whoever owns land is the one who profits from the cultural production external to their property. The cultural producers, on the other hand, are most often renters and plant the seeds of their own displacement through their productive work.

Luckily, Detroit has abundant open land for cheap and a strong culture of home ownership, with 54.79% of homes occupied by their owner. Compared with Manhattan at 22.8% and Brooklyn at 30.3%., Detroit’s resurgence need not displace its existing population.29 Even if increased property taxes were to force residents out of their homes, they would still profit through the increased value of their home at sale. Further, new creatively minded arrivals in Detroit have the opportunity for the capital stake in their own cultural creation 20

that is unavailable elsewhere. If they succeed in creating a vibrant culture, then they will be the ones who profit from it.

If abstract ownership of private property is the basis of Empire, then common ownership is the basis of the Multitude. In Detroit, groups of artists could buy a house or even an entire city block, establish a non-profit community land trust, and develop the property in common while paying no property taxes. These new commons, if governed properly, could form a unique urban fabric that can’t be found anywhere else in the world, thus drawing ever more members of the creative class. This will benefit nearby private businesses by creating a broader consumer base and ease the burden of the public sector by empowering residents to be stewards of the land.

Here, the work of Elinor Ostrom should serve as a guide. Ostrom was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for her proofs that common management is often the most efficient, productive, equitable model of governance, particularly in the realm of resource management and social justice.30 She also spelled out the specific attributes of effective commons management.31 What we are seeing in cities today, through Occupy Wall Street and elsewhere, is the reclamation of the commons. This is a positive trend for the Multitude, and if governed properly, could form a more sustainable economy. Detroit is uniquely positioned to expand the commons because of depressed land values and a culture of cooperation formed through decades of organized labor struggle. Detroit has the space and the culture within which a new urban commons could grow.

What these commons might look like in the context of the metropolis was foreshadowed by Occupy. The urban space created by Occupy was a dynamic field of freedom in which space was organically designed by the community, and horizontal institutions were formed to meet their needs. This was possible because the people who participated in the Occupation were their own governing body. There was no crisis of representation as it exists in outside institutional forms. In fact, many of the visitors to Zuccoti Park noted that the space itself was liberating, as if something new emerged in the world to allow information and ideas to be discussed with greater openness and effectiveness.

As political organizer Yotam Marom recalled: “It feels like something has been opened up, a kind of space nobody knew existed, and so all sorts of things that were impossible before are possible now. Something just got kind of unclogged. All sorts of people just started to see their struggles in this, started being able to identify with it, started feeling like winning is possible, there is an alternative, it doesn’t have to be this way. I think that’s the special thing here.”32

This sense of liberation was the result of common governance in which all affected parties had equal say in community rules. The space became engrained with the spirit of the political forms that governed it. And, luckily, these spaces are reproducible outside of the context of Occupy because “despite the relentless and continuous operation of enclosure that the imperial armadas produce, there are always liberated spaces within globalization—holes and folds through which an exodus of resistance can take place.”33 Alterurbanism creates these spaces of liberation and multiplies them through active community engagement.

In Detroit, there are ample opportunities to create these types of liberated space in the ruins of the industrial economy. These new sites of liberation, and the possibility for both temporary and more lasting action, are the new frontier for resistance of the Multitude. They mirror both the purpose and function of the Parisian 21

cafes of the 19th century. Perhaps they will likewise produce the same kind of revolutionary cultural advancement.

The urban project of the next century is to establish the commons as a third and equal branch of the economy alongside private and public ownership. This is how we will transition between the turnings—from Crisis into High—and form the basis of new institutions for civil society.

Of all the places in the world in which a commons based society can take root, Detroit is the place to start.

The Multitude awaits.

Gaia City “Town and Country must be married, and out of this joyous union will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civilization.”34 In addition to issues of global governance, global ecological awareness is also blossoming in cities throughout the world.

Alterurbanism attempts to find ways of life that are in harmony with nature, generative to the biosphere, and culturally enriching within the specific context of the city. Cities have the potential to be our lightest treading settlement form, but because of modernist planning based on the supremacy of the car, our cities are too often our greatest polluters. At present, “despite accounting for around half of the world’s population, cities are responsible for around 75% of energy consumption and 80% of greenhouse gas emissions.”35 It need not be this way. The nature of social relations within the city and its spatial layout lends itself to a sustainable retrofit. Alterurbanism seeks to green the city by weaving nature in as an indispensable feature within the context of the city rather than something to be fought against and kept at bay.

Let us be clear about all of this from the outset. When discussing issues of environmental sustainability, we are not discussing the health of the planet per se, but rather human-specific survival. Life on Earth will endure, even if we do not. In fact, if we keep up our current polluting and wasteful practices, then the Earth might flush us out for the very purpose of preserving life on this planet.

This is because the Earth itself can be viewed as one, large living organism with circulatory and immune systems similar to our own. And humans, in our current model of development, are acting like a virus. This holistic understanding of planetary systems, called Gaia theory36, was put forth by James Lovelock and it’s useful in contextualizing humanity within a global scale.

In light of Gaia theory, every human activity—from building cities to generating waste—should be viewed as contributing in some way to a broader planetary system. Further, both our conscious actions and our subconscious drives are equally at the whims of Gaia. Thus, the rapid migration of humans to cities can be viewed as a means by which the planet as a whole is trying to achieve one of two separate aims in light of our intense emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere through industrialization and sprawl: either it is seeking equilibrium by placing humans within close proximity so as to establish more harmonious built forms, or it is attempting to flush us out by congregating us in over-consumptive heat islands that are destined to fail.37 The choice is ours. Greening our cities is a matter of species survival.

While the path ahead is not yet clear, human impact on the planet is undeniable. Earth scientists have gone so far as to suggest that the current geological era should be referred to as the Anthropocene, to better reflect human impact on planetary ecology.38 Cities themselves are the site of this dramatic impact because they are “the material representation of today’s energy-intensive economies where carbon-based energy systems—oil, electricity and mobility systems—have 22

made the huge agglomerations of cities and modern industrial systems possible.”39 The disruption that this agglomeration causes to its natural environment leads to unpredictable weather patterns and unreliable food and water systems. As such, climate change is a matter of urban, national, and global security.

There is reason for optimism, though, given the rise of ecological awareness that has counter-intuitively accompanied increased urbanization. Yet true sustainability requires an even greater leap in Earth consciousness. The challenge is to reconceive the city itself as a conscious reflection of our role within Gaia.

From this perspective, cities play an important role in the evolution, not only of the human species, but of the entire planet because “the biosphere, or Gaia, is evolving a physical brain composed largely of our humanbuilt infrastructure of cities and their support structures.”40 If you look at a picture of the globe at night, or a model of flight patterns, or diagrams of Internet correspondences you can begin to notice the way in which parts of the Earth congregated in cities are becoming connected like neural nodes in the brain. As global Earth consciousness emerges, systems for reducing our environmental impact—in fact, systems that can be ecologically generative—will begin to emerge.

By living densely we can significantly reduce the impact of auto emissions. By basing our economy on the creation of informational and cultural products, we can moderate our industrial waste. By actualizing urban agriculture, we can shrink the supply chain of the food system. By creating natural oases within the city itself, we can create sites of adventure, encounter, and reflection that are too often lacking in the concrete jungle. By integrating a smarter grid based on renewable energy sources, we can, at last, find a way of life that is harmony with the natural world.

A more ecologically aware city is advantageous for human well being, in addition to being beneficial to the natural world. The desire for the social benefits of civilization coupled with the need for the psychological benefits of nature is perhaps the greatest tension within the human psyche. Eco-psychologist have pinpointed this disconnect as the cause of many contemporary anxieties. In their view, the role of the psychologist should be “to help people see the magnitude of their alienation from the natural environment and guide them toward finding ways to bridge this gap”.41 The city need not be an isolated island of concrete and asphalt, nor should it be. The grave ecological challenges of our time require a dynamic fusion of urban and rural. Urbanites need to take a cue from the onrush of rural migration and integrate their ways of life into the life of the city. Architects, urban planners, and real estate developers should take design cues from the workings of natural systems.

Many cities are doing this already. In Chicago, The Plant is social enterprise model that operates within an adaptively re-used meatpacking plant. Through both a non-profit and for-profit collaboration, The Plant has been transformed into a hybrid facility that houses a vertical urban farm, food business incubator, and a research and education space. The reconstruction transformed the building into a net-zero energy enterprise that utilizes resource loops that link every process in The Plant into another process. In this way, The Plant processes operate similarly to the interrelated processes of nature. By 2015, The Plant plans to run completely off the grid and produce zero waste. They will achieve this by installing an anaerobic digester and a combined heat and power plant that will take advantage of the waste generated by The Plant to power it.42 In 2009, San Francisco passed the Mandatory Composting and Recycling Ordinance. Since this law was created, the city has diverted 77% of waste away from landfills each year.43 In place of a cradle to grave waste management system, the ordinance created a symbiotic relationship between the city and its surrounding rural region. The compost generated by the city becomes the soil for Napa Valley wineries. Other cities should follow San Francisco’s lead in order to create a generative waste system that benefits the city’s outlying regions.

In New York City, volunteers are working with the city to plant one million trees in order to curb carbon emissions and create more livable communities. Additionally, volunteers are working with the city to paint 23

building roofs white in order to stem the urban heat island effect through the NYC Cool Roofs initiatives.

These bottom-up initiatives are being heeded by socially minded New York City real estate developers like Jonathan Rose, who places ecological awareness at the core of his business. Rose’s Via Verde affordable housing complex “is inspired by the integration of nature and city.”44 The project’s organizing architectural elements are a series of garden spaces and green roofs. It also features south facing solar panels, and is built with easy access to public transit.

In Detroit, urban farming is rightly being viewed as a path to renewal in the new alterurban age. With abundant open land, the city has the potential to become a world leader of urban agriculture. Dozens of small farms already operate within Detroit’s forty square miles of vacant land, and the city planning commission even formed the Urban Agriculture Workgroup to encourage their activity.45 Major institutions are beginning to take notice of this grassroots trend. Michigan State University recently announced plans to open a 100 acre, $100 million urban agricultural research facility46, and a local entrepreneur named John Hanz announced plans to open the world’s largest urban farm.47 On the national level, standards like LEED are important first steps toward greening America’s building stock. This standard works within the market system by increasing the value of leasable space for developers.

Businesses are willing to pay a premium to be viewed as environmentally friendly. Too often, though, LEED’s green credentials are only skin deep. This is for two reasons: LEED lacks an enforcement arm, so a building’s Platinum status can never be rescinded. Further, standards are based on the design and construction phases, rather than performance, so there are LEED-Bronze buildings that perform better than LEED-Platinum. As the standard becomes more pervasive, its mechanisms and metrics will hopefully evolve.

This is, in fact, likely because LEED is the product of an ongoing discussion between stakeholders in a sustainable built environment. An early sign of positive evolution is found in the newest edition of the standard which goes into effect in 2012 and improves LEED through greater emphasis on building context.

Additionally, the world is currently experiencing an urban park renaissance unparalleled since Frederick Law Olmstead created Central Park and Prospect Park in New York, Belle Isle in Detroit, and designed dozens of other parks in almost every major North American city of the mid-19th Century. Now, in Milan, the BioMilan project is an integrated approach to the infusion of nature into the city. The plan calls for a vertical forest in a tower with 1500 trees, the reintroduction of traditional courtyard farms, a global kitchen garden for Expo 2015, and the creation of Metrobosco—a greenbelt forest to end the city’s sprawl. Equally ambitious is Chicago’s Millennium Reserve Plan, which will transform 140,000 acres of under-used and post-industrial land on Chicago’s South Side into America’s largest urban park. In addition, Nashville and Atlanta, New York and Philadelphia, Seoul and Shanghai, are all finding ways to reclaim derelict urban spaces as parks.

All of these efforts together reconfigure our concept of the city to better reflect natural processes and bring humans in cities into harmony with the natural world. While the attempt to synthesize urban and rural is not a new phenomenon, doing so in the context of the potential for global ecological collapse is. This gives the ecological approach to urban development an increased sense of urgency with potentially apocalyptic consequences. In order to move forward, we can learn a lot from the successes and failures of the past.

Historically, the most famous attempt at urban/rural synthesis is Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City. According to Howard's model, the Garden City would be a community arranged in concentric rings alternating between green space and inhabited space. The central ring would house all the essential civic functions of the Garden City, as well as a Crystal Palace mall, which would be surrounded by a large central park. The outer ring would be a large green belt that would consist mainly of wilderness, some light industry, convalescent homes, and schools. In between there would parks and gardens, and neighborhood allotments that would be connected by six radial boulevards. Once the Garden City reached a population of 32,000, a second city would be started nearby, separated from the first by a green belt of its own. And so on. Eventually all of the Garden Cities would form a large planned conglomeration called the Social City that would be connected by an Inter-Municipal Railway.

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However, application of the Garden City model overlooked two key elements in Howard's plans. The first is that Howard wrote for hard-nosed businessmen who could make the Garden City a practical reality, rather than starry-eyed utopians in whose hands the Garden City would exist only in a dream. Garden Cities of Tomorrow is filled with charts and figures all in the attempt to show early investors that this model of development, first and foremost, made economic sense. The second overlooked aspect of the Garden City was its radically democratic governing system. Residents would eventually own the Garden City collectively, and would govern its affairs through the participatory democracy of citizens “whose ideals of society rise higher than the average”. 48 In Howard's view, the Garden City would be more than just a town: it was to be a third socio-economic system superior to capitalism and socialism. His Garden City of Tomorrow was to be an almost pure anarchic- communist form of society that would use the master's tools of initial investment to liberate itself.

And therein lies the downfall of the Garden City in practice. Early investors never let go of the land. People didn't govern it collectively on anywhere near the scale that Howard had intended. And an unforeseen technological innovation in the form of the automobile rendered the poetry of Howard's civic model imbedded within the Garden City design obsolete.

The experience of the Garden City has a lot to teach us in light of climate change, economic collapse on a global scale, and a pace of rapid urbanization that surpasses that of the industrialization of Howard's time.

The challenge we face today is how to create environmentally sustainable communities that are also economically viable. The United Kingdom's answer is the Eco-Town's Initiative, largely inspired by the Garden City. While many aspects of the plan are promising—particularly requiring entire communities, not just individual buildings, to achieve zero carbon status—it gets the biggest piece wrong. As the first point outlined as Key Criteria for Eco-Towns in the Eco-Town Prospectus illustrates: “Eco-towns must be new settlements, separate and distinct from existing towns but well linked to them. They need to be additional to existing plans, with a minimum target of 5,000-10,000 homes.”49 This ignores the fatal flaw of the Garden City: that is, starting cities from scratch in search of some ideal form of life. Models are bound to fail at the macro-level. No Model can take into account the multitude of issues that arise in practice over the passing of time. Further, constructing Eco-towns from scratch and building new infrastructure to connect them to established areas is not only expensive, but harmful for the environment as well.

The idea that we are going to solve the energy crisis by creating autonomous Eco-town flies in the face of demographic realities. As such, our efforts to create a sustainable society should be based around our existing cities. If the greenest house is the one we've already built, then the same holds true for our greenest cities.

Rather than waste resources building entirely new Eco-towns and the infrastructure required to run them, we should focus on retrofitting existing cities for a greener future.

Green infrastructure and sustainability initiatives have more hope for success in the city than the countryside, with its wider tax base, more numerous opportunities for public/private partnerships, and eligibility for assorted federal grant funding.

If Detroit wants to be an international leader of sustainability it should apply the following Rules at the city level:  

A new Energy zoning category should be instituted that reserves a designated percentage of land for neighborhood scale renewable energy production.

Relax health and safety regulations that allow urban agriculture to become a working reality.

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   

The rooftop level should be the property of the city. Rooftops will be transformed into spaces reserved for renewable energy production, agriculture, and public recreation.

Green space should represent a fixed designated percentage of every neighborhood.

Access to public transit should be viewed as a human right.

Preference should be given to the adaptive reuse of old buildings rather than new construction.

When new construction is necessary, it must be carbon neutral.

Rather than focusing on the creation of new eco-cities, Detroit is uniquely positioned to establish econeighborhoods that can test out best practices in derelict parts of the city through direct city funding and eligible grants. The neighborhood level, as we have seen, is the level most akin to a commons, and commons have been proven to be the most efficient model for environmental stewardship. Additionally, Detroit should create a Green Deal for its existing building stock. This will solidify existing structures and create new opportunities for employment.

In this context, Detroit epitomizes hope for smart, sustainable growth. Existing infrastructure makes the creation of new communities more organic there. Within the post-industrial city's borders, vast open land and abandoned warehouses represent opportunities for sustainable growth in the form of agriculture, energy lots, wildlife preserves, and other green initiatives.

A happy irony will occur when the post-industrial cities that led us down the path of environmental ruin become the leaders in ecological harmony.

Network City “The realist in all of us refuses to believe in Eden. But I’m willing to believe in the potential of essentially infinite bandwidth.”50 Alterurbanism also reconfigures the overarching metaphor of social relations away from explaining life through the lens of pure free-market capitalism. For decades, market logic has expanded and co-opted almost every arena of social life, including language. At conferences, people talk about the value of social capital. In books people write about cities as “a diversified portfolio of employers”.51 Hop on the subway and you’re likely to hear the message: “Valued customers, thank you for riding the MTA.” It’s almost impossible for the government to view itself as anything other than a business and its citizens as anything other than its customers.

The continued privatization of public space and civil services has largely crippled our society’s ability to view relationships in terms outside the market structure of buyers and sellers. Since the greed is good days of Reagan and Thatcher the West has followed an ideology that “defines human beings as rational, ahistorical who invariably seek to maximize their material utility through market exchange. It also asserts, astonishingly, that all of society should be organized around this vision.”52 The city has not escaped this expansion of market driven ideology. The very fabric of the built environment is often shaped by market forces. In fact, “American downtown is a product of purposeful design actions that have effectively sought to mold space according to the needs of a corporatist economy and to subordinate urban form to the logic of the market.”53 The urban renewal tactic embraced by most cities is to lure businesses to build offices through tax breaks. Thus the skyline of the city reflects a decades’ long trend of supply-side economics.

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But was it always thus?

Cities have always been sites of production—transitioning through the stages of Agrarian, Industrial, and Informational products. As the products produced by the city became more and more abstract, so too did markets. They were transformed from physical spaces within the city to an abstract concept that captured the entire economy of the city itself. Thus the raison d’etre of city governance became the nourishment of this market model and the adoption of its tools and tactics of control.

The city’s shift from industrial to informational economy is perhaps the greatest reason for the sheer number of abandoned 20th Century buildings. The fall of Detroit, for example, was a forerunner to the fall of the manufacturing economy more generally, and the city’s abandoned buildings are thus testaments to a failed economic model, or more precisely, an economy that evolved from industrial to informational, and didn't take into account the waste it would leave in its wake.

While policy makers continue to coddle the forces of the market by bestowing the big bankers with an almost aristocratic position above society, the question must be asked: is there a different model for social relations that is more sustainable and more accurately reflects the complexity of social life around which we can organize our societies? Is there a system that recognizes that “true citizens are not the audience of their government, nor its consumers; they are its makers”?54 There is, and it’s one that 80% of Americans engage in already, according to the Pew Research Center.55 That system is the network,56 and it’s emerging today as a potentially new organizing structure for society as a whole, and for cities in particular.

One reason for optimism is that the network has proven to be an elusive model for markets to control. The inability for the music and movie industries to corral dissemination of their copyrights is perhaps the most obvious example of this. At the time of this writing, the classical enforcers of market and property rights (the state) are beginning to waver in their traditional loyalties. The Stop Online Piracy Act—which would have ended the free and open Internet through the guise of anti-piracy legislation—came to the floor of congress, and network opposition stopped the bill dead in its tracks. Major websites including Google and Wikipedia participated in an Internet blackout in protest, and congress responded by defeating the bill which had once been favored to pass easily.

The power of the network lies in its ability to subsume the market within its ranks, in the same way that the market was able to subsume civil society. Further, the market system has been forced to adopt network models within its own institutions in order to compete in the informational economy. As Manuel Castells wrote in the Rise of Network Society “Capitalism itself has undergone a process of profound restructuring characterized by greater flexibility in management, decentralization, and networking of firms both internally and in their relationships to other firms”57 The market is trying to become more like a network. The city is too.

The network-form also challenges classical economics on another, more fundamental level. Economic theory is based on the premise that humans are rational, self-interested actors who are productive for the sole purpose of material gain—the profit-motive as the only means of animating the masses into action. The creative and dispersed power of the Internet proves this premise to be a fantasy. Open-source software, the 27

mass proliferation of memes, and the everyday production of signs and affects reveals that the profit motive is not an impetus, but more often an inhibitor, of our productive capacities. In the network, people are motivated to create by forming ever more connections and by achieving status as a reliable source of information and creator of effective abstract production, not because they expect to receive some monetary gain.

Imagine a city governed by the open-source and participatory nature of the internet. If the principles that govern the network were to supersede the principles that govern the market, this would have profound impact on how human beings relate to each-other offline.

The seeds of this new social order exist in cities today in the form of food trucks, pop-ups, tactical urbanism, and the implementation of civic mobile applications—all of which use the Internet as a tool and a model for city development. Facebook and Twitter become necessary instruments in the creation and dissemination of these new urban forms that utilize the built environment of the city as an ever-shifting network-form rather than a static market one.

This is not to say that alterurbanism seeks to destroy the marketplace as a social space within cities, but rather it is an attempt to subordinate it from its preeminence as the dominant organizational feature of our lives to a more socially healthy position. Markets still have a role to play—an important one even—within the alterurban world. In alterurbanism the stratification between producers and consumers is shrunk, and the middle men of Adam Smith's proverbial carrying economy have a much diminished role.58 In an alterurban market, the opportunities for engagement and encounter with producers of goods and practitioners of trades are just as important as the exchange of goods and services. At places like the Brooklyn Flea, the Bay Area Maker Faire, and Berlin’s Flohmarkt am Mauerpark, the market is itself a form of entertainment, a site of spectacle that is socially enriching even without cash swapping hands.

Cities expand the imaginative capacities of their inhabitants, in that people are confronted on a daily basis by strangers with ways of life that are alien to their own. In this way, the cosmopolitan is forced to imagine forms of life beyond the possibilities of his or her own personal experience. It is from this fertile imaginative ground that alterurbanism finds strength. There is an in-built tendency toward empathy within the city' social structure that can be nourished through the utilization of social network models for the implementation of social policy.

This approach has already been attempted with success in Great Britain. The Connected Communities initiative encourages planners and other government officials to visually map the social networks in their districts. In doing so, New Cross Gate officials were able to see the way in which unemployed members of the community existed on the fringes of the network and had fewer strong tie relationships than the average.

With this network model in mind, officials then geared their employment policies toward the transformation of weak ties into strong ties.

While network-models allow government to recognize already existing connections within their communities, programs like Boston’s Citizens Connect are reconfiguring the role of city governance to reflect network principles. Through an online social network, Citizens Connect allows the government to create a platform upon which the citizens can govern themselves. People can report failing infrastructure from their smart phones, relieving the city of the need to send out surveyors. Further, citizens can express their community needs and link up with others toward civic actions through the online portal. This converts government from 28

a provider of services to a creator of platforms of information exchange and community empowerment more in line with the network model of social organization.

An additional player in the civic web is Code for America, a non-profit organization that seeks to “help to identify projects that can benefit from web-based solutions”59 within city government. It is working to make city government leaner and more efficient through the creation of civic minded mobile applications. It is essentially the tech version of Teach for America, in which employees of Facebook, Google, and Apple donate a year of their career to become fellows within selected city governments. Code for America completed its first year in 2011, and they created apps like Adopt-A-Hydrant, which brings network gaming into the space of the city so that citizens are encouraged to shovel snow that covers fire hydrants during storms. Using the Four Square model of “checking in” Adopt-A-Hydrant incentivizes citizen engagement through increased civic status and reward. The potential of these apps within urban space is only now being uncovered.

Another way in which networks are transforming urban space is through the recent trend of food-trucks and pop-up retail. Both business models emerge directly as a result of the precariousness of capital in the postrecession world. Since credit isn’t readily available, small businesses are forced to get creative. Food-trucks create mobile restaurants that change location day-to-day rather than paying high priced rents. Conversely, pop-ups rent out vacant space for short-term leases and give exposure to up-and-coming merchants. Yet neither of these models would be feasible without the network. The internet and social networking allow events to be publicized quickly and tactically. Further, text messaging allows attendees to spread the word to their friends in an instant. Without the network, the temporal nature of these business models wouldn’t be possible. With the network, the transience of these businesses as unique urban experiences gives them cultural cache. Their very presence becomes an event.

Take, for example, Souvlaki GR, the Vendy Award winner for Best Food Truck in New York in 2011. Its entire business strategy revolves around creating community through Facebook and Twitter by announcing new locations each day and interacting with customers through the social networks. Further, the food truck utilizes a network of food blogs to promote itself to market mavens. In this way, customers become part of a broader community that surrounded the food truck, and feel a certain pride in finding the truck in new places on the streets of New York City.

Other cities are using networks to reshape urban space itself, and not just in America. One of the biggest challenges for local governments in India is a lack of cohesive, up-to-date information about the poor in their cites. Data is often scattered across the vast bureaucracy. In 1999, a group of urbanists began to visually map available data through network platforms.

In the city of Sangli (population: 500,000), 15% of the population lives in slums without adequate infrastructure or housing, despite incredible urban growth. Through mapping of various demographic points (castes, home ownership status, fuel types, construction type, and so forth) planners have more accurate information that allows them to make smarter choices for their city.

But more remarkable is the engagement of an informal federation of slum residents in the creation of slum development and housing policy. By understanding the geographic location of their homes, residents were able to formulate policies that helped them avoid displacement and also created open and public spaces.

There was also a policy of community housing improvements in which individual houses were improved through community support.60 29

This kind of bottom up planning should be incorporated into urban policy of the West. It’s the most democratic form of planning, and can ensure that policies emerge from local needs rather than be imposed from above. Further, it will unleash the inherent creativity and resourcefulness of communities. This is already happening in Detroit, with organizations like Data Driven Detroit providing open source demographic information available for free online.61 This allows planners, developers, and community organizers to work with the most accurate and up-to-date information in order to formulate the best possible policies and initiatives.

The benefit of networks is that they are easy to visualize, gain strength through openness and participation, and are highly adaptable to change. Networks reflect the foundational philosophies of democratic societies far better than markets. Alterubanism utilizes networks as a means by which to bring all city-dwellers intuitively into the productive and governing realms of city life. The key is creating the platforms and interfaces that make this transition natural.

In Detroit, they’re just getting started.

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Alterurban Detroit

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“The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.�62

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While Alterurbanism remains a dispersed global phenomenon, there is one city that is uniquely positioned to take advantage of alternative and bottom-up methods of urban development that empower the Multitude, are ecologically sensitive, and take advantage of network forms. That city is Detroit.

In fact, given the rise in community driven revitalization efforts, it is clear that Alterurbanism has already taken root in the Motor City. This is largely the result of the forces of depressed land values, open space, and historic fabric that allow Detroit to be the American city most open to urban experimentation.

It would be a mistake, however, to make extreme statements about Detroit. To cast it off as a failed city would be to ignore the dynamism that exists in pockets of what is still one of America’s largest cities. But neither is this yet a wholesale renaissance. The problem is, at present, signs of life in the city are just pockets, and too often disconnected. Some blocks and even whole neighborhoods—particularly those built purely for residential usage that were derided decades ago by Jane Jacobs—may never recover. Yet still there is reason for hope.

One reason is the Green Garage, a sustainable small business incubator located in the burgeoning Midtown neighborhood that opened in the fall of 2011. Based in a renovated 1920s auto-showroom, the Green Garage houses fifteen small businesses and gives them a platform to succeed by creating a supportive community that is continually engaged in a dialogue about businesses practices and what they can do to support the city.

All Green Garage businesses are committed to the triple bottom philosophy in which people, planet, and profit are viewed as the three pillars of business.

The Green Garage emerged as a direct response to the Great Recession, when small businesses were struggling and needed to create new models for growth. The planning and construction of the space was the product of a vast volunteer network of 200 dedicated individuals. Through these community contacts, the Green Garage was able to retrofit the building in a way that was both historically and ecologically sensitive without the design being driven top-down from the dictates of an architect. This crowd-source design and construction process took a little under four years, with approximately two years devoted to planning and an additional two to construction. During this time, community members made new connections and gained new skills, making neighborhood bonds stronger in the process of economic revitalization. Since completion, the Green Garage has maintained community ties with an open lunch every Friday. This model of community engagement—in which planning and design are crowd-sourced, and in which community is at the heart of business—is a pathway for durable neighborhoods.63 The impact that the Green Garage has had on its block is unmistakable. Before 2011, cars were routinely vandalized on Second Avenue between Prentis and W Canfield. Now, people park their cars on the block without worry. Further, since the Green Garage opened, The Motor City Brewing Works completed a building extension that makes it more forward facing to the community on the same block, and the media company Model D opened up its headquarters in renovated Victorian house next-door. Now, this portion of Second Avenue is highly walkable with a mix of business types, architectural styles, and residential accommodations nearby.

Yet Green Garage is more than just a good neighbor; it is an ecological steward as well. The Green Garage achieves sustainability through a tight building envelope and a solar powered water heating system that is so effective that the yearly heating bill for this 12,000 sq. ft. space that endures harsh Michigan winters is just $300. Further, 90% of on-site materials were re-used in the renovation, 80% of all new materials were reclaimed from the waste stream, and non-recycled new materials like triple-paned windows were sourced 33

from Kelly Windows, a local manufacturer. Thus the entire design process was flipped on its head: rather than design driving material choices, the available materials drove the design. The impact is a mix of historical preservation, green building practices, and a unique and local character.

Another community driven effort that is filling the void left behind by government and big business is the Roosevelt Park Revival project, a vision for improved green space in the shadow of the iconic Michigan Central Station. Started in 2010, the Roosevelt Park Revival project envisions an enjoyable park in the heart of Corktown, one of Detroit’s up-and-coming neighborhoods.

The project is unique in that the design is being determined entirely by Corktown residents rather than a landscape architect hired by the city. Volunteers go door-to-door to get community input on design features.

There are also monthly forums and special events throughout the year that allow the community to coalesce around the vision for the park while simultaneously raising funds for the project. The organizers—a board of nine people—are also utilizing the city as a platform by accessing city-owned tools for construction projects and events.64 This community-driven project benefits private landowners by improving the quality of life of the neighborhood, and thereby raising property values. It also benefits city government, by easing the burden of park maintenance. An improved public realm is one of the first steps to urban revitalization.

Yet massive macro-level challenges remain if Detroit is to reinvent itself in the alterurban mold. First, there’s the issue of sustainable connectivity. Detroit’s built environment and infrastructure are dominated by the car.

Six lane streets are not uncommon; and neither are parking lots in what should be prime real estate. In order to prosper, Detroit needs a serviceable public transit system. The proposed light rail system is good first step.65 As city after city shows, economies develop around transit links. But in addition to high-priced light rail, Detroit’s connectivity could be increased for cheap by incorporating a Copenhagen-style bike infrastructure that provides dedicated protected lanes for bike travel along the city’s already too-large streets.

This is partially underway in places like the Midtown Loop and Dequindre Cut, but these efforts should be integrated into a broader bike network that connects the emerging areas of the city. The city should commission a bike-infrastructure master plan and then utilize community resourcefulness and government tools to make it a reality.

Further, the government as a whole should reverse its emphasis on mega-projects, and instead put more resources into strengthening communities. The city should conceive of itself as a platform upon which the community can realize its own goals rather than as a provider of services. This can be done through targeted grant giving for projects like the Green Garage and Roosevelt Park, and also through a system of participatory budgeting. Additionally, an online and mobile information system like Boston’s Citizens Connect could also relieve the pressure on the city budget by empowering citizens to help each other out.

So while alterurbanism is clearly emerging in Detroit with organizations and projects as wide-ranging as The Greening of Detroit, Detroit Soup, Midtown Sound, Brother Nature Farm, SPAR, and the Detroit Fireguild, the city must still overcome the challenges of entrenched institutional thinking if it is to move forward into the future. It also needs a vision.

Freetown Detroit

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Perhaps it would be helpful now to envision what alterurbanism would look like if it coalesced in a single neighborhood. How might a neighborhood look and function if guided by the principles of alterurbanism?

What follows is a planning framework for an alterurban enclave in Detroit. It is not in any way meant to be exhaustive. Rather, it is aimed at highlighting the ways in which key elements of alterurbanism may be linked together. It is an attempt to propose Rules for alterurban neighborhoods. Any suggestions that veer toward Models should be taken to be just that: suggestions.

Name This development will be called Freetown Detroit in order to express solidarity with the principles of Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen, a radical democratic community that was established in 1971. Among the principles of this community are: collective land ownership, radical self-governance, adaptive re-use of post-industrial buildings, and a symbiotic relationship with nature.

Geography Freetown Detroit will exist within a small enclave of the broader Rivertown Warehouse District, bounded by Woodbridge to the north, Atwater to the South, Rivard to the West, and Dubois to the East.

The area is defined by its post-industrial landscape, with abandoned low-rise brick warehouses serving as the primary building type, and uncommonly narrow roads as its thoroughfares.

The neighborhood is within walking distance of established public spaces including the Detroit Riverwalk, Chene Park, Orleans Atwater Park, Gabriel Richard Park, the Dequindre Cut Greenway, and Belle Isle.

Ownership Model Freetown Detroit will form a non-profit community land-trust whose mission is to provide affordable housing and to promote the arts in the public realm. The land trust will own all of the land within Freetown Detroit, and as a non-profit, it will be exempt from property taxes. Additionally, as a non-profit entity, the land trust will be eligible to receive tax-exempt donations and will be able to apply for grant funding for community projects.

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Individual members of the community will own shares of the land trust, but not individual land lots. Shares may be received through a capital payment or through a determined amount of labor. People who work to make Freetown Detroit a living reality will be able to own shares in the community, not just people with the financial means to buy land. If a member decides to leave the community, he or she is free to sell their share at a profit or a loss.

Governance Freetown Detroit will be governed democratically. The forms of this democracy should be determined by its inhabitants. Models that it might follow are the consensus and working group system of Occupy, with a regular general assembly; or a spokes council in which various groups have equal representation.

Integrated Retail and Residential Detroit often finds itself in a catch-22. Retailers won’t move to Detroit because there aren’t enough people in specific neighborhoods, and people won’t move to Detroit because there isn’t enough retail. Freetown Detroit mitigates this by granting ownership shares to people who set up shop in the neighborhood. This will guarantee that retail and residential grow together rather than one waiting for the other to develop first.

Sense of place Freetown Detroit recognizes sense of place as the cornerstone of unique urban developments. It will create this sense of place through various additions to the public realm. First, the brick roads that already exist on Woodbridge will be extended to the entire district. Additionally, a civic-minded public art placemaking initiative like Montreal’s Pink Balls by Claude Cormier will be installed on Franklin Street in order to draw people to neighborhood and imbed it within people minds.

Sidewalks will have numerous and varied seating options which will allow for engagement, encounter and reflection.

Additionally, residents and visitors will have to pass through an arch or some other kind of threshold in order to enter or leave the Freetown. This will provide a bookend experience of the neighborhood.

Sustainability An onsite vacant lot at the corner of Orleans and Franklin will be transformed into a combined heat and power plant as well as a large scale solar farm. Freetown Detroit aims to power the entire district off the grid at net-zero energy.

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Permeable pavement will be placed throughout the public realm in order to prevent flooding in the neighborhood. This will ease the burden on the city’s sewer system and ensure that the Detroit River stays clean.

Within individual homes, energy, water, and materials should be generative and form closed-loop systems where possible.

Community Incubator The heart of the community will be the community incubator, which will provide space and tools for the creation of community assets. It will also be a place of community meeting, performance, and display. All official Freetown business will take place here. The incubator will also host lectures, musical performances, film screenings, and art shows.

Tech Freetown Detroit will integrate technology into the lifeblood of the community. Community meetings will take place both offline and in the Freetown online social network. Members of the community will be able to vote for initiatives online, through a mobile phone app, or in person.

Additionally, Freetown Detroit will provide free computer access to all of its members in a dedicated space in the community incubator. The computers will be linked to 3-D printers that can help create materials and tools that may be beneficial for individual or communal use.

Parks and Farms There are plenty of opportunities to create new urban parks and farms within Freetwon Detroit. Vacant lots exist throughout the neighborhood’s internal streets as well as the cross sections of Atwater and St Aubin, and Orleans and Franklin.

The Globe Trading Company factory at Atwater and Orleans provides a unique opportunity to reclaim a post industrial site and link Freetown to the river. First the building should be structurally secured. Then all hazardous material should be removed. After that, the Globe Trading building can be transformed into an extension of the park by housing a café with seating inside the reclaimed ruins.

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This concept of the post-industrial park feature has proven successful at Gasworks Park in Seattle and is uniquely beneficial to a city like Detroit.

Pedestrian Only The streets of Freetown Detroit will be reserved for pedestrians only. This will strengthen the bonds of the existing community, as well increase the economic vitality of the neighborhood. Cars can’t shop or make things.

A fleet of communally owned electric vehicles will be parked in a single lot, which will be fueled by solar powered plug-in stations. Members of the Freetown Detroit community can reserve the cars either through the online community portal or through a text messaging system similar to Zipcar.

Pop-Up Neighborhood In order to generate interest in the development of Freetown Detroit, the neighborhood will first house small businesses for a period of one month during the summer. This will be done in conjunction with a street festival that will draw people to the site. The pop-up neighborhood will give potential members, donors, and developers a living example of what the neighborhood will one day look like, while simultaneously benefiting Detroit’s existing small businesses through increased exposure.

The Temp Lot An onsite vacant lot at the corner of Orleans and Franklin will be reserved for temporary urban spaces. These can take the form of public art pieces, markets, performances, or whatever the community conceives of.

These temporary experiences will be limited to a length of one month. Outside creators may approach the community with their proposals, and all activities at the Temp Lot will voted on six months in advance.

The Temp Lot will ensure community dynamism. It will continually draw people to the Freetown, and it will serve as an incubator for future commercial enterprises and permanent fixtures of the public realm.

New Construction Freetown Detroit’s first option for construction is always adaptive re-use. However, if adaptive re-use is not possible, or if the community grows too large, then new construction can take on one of three forms: buildings made from recycled materials, buildings made from natural materials like straw bale or cob, or wikibuildings that are downloaded online and “printed” at a local CNC mill.

Dequindre Cut Dequindre Cut Greenway is a 1.3 mile promenade and park space outside of the borders of the Freetown. If properly renovated, it could serve as a major asset to the community by providing a unique urban experience and increasing sustainable connectivity to the Eastern Market neighborhood to the north. In fact, Dequindre Cut has the potential to become one of America’s great public spaces that could draw tourists throughout the year.

The great untapped assets of the Dequindre Cut are the seven overpasses and the thirteen 15x15 ft large concrete blocks that are scattered along the path. At present, they are either blank or covered by graffiti.

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These prominent features should be integrated into the park in a comprehensive way.

In order to create a dynamic urban space, the city should commission a combination of world renowned and local artists to utilize these as giant urban canvasses. In doing so, they will create the greatest collection of urban public art in the world. This urban public art gallery will transform the Dequindre Cut from a promenade, to a world renowned urban park.

While the artists get to work, Dequindre Cut should be shut for three months. During this time, the city should improve the landscape, add new lighting, and design new park spaces along the edges. Afterward, the park should open in the same fashion and with all the pomp and ceremony of a gallery opening. This event will bring visitors to the Dequindre Cut and give the park the media exposure that will drive future tourism.

Essence The existing Rivertown neighborhood has all of the elements of other great artistic communities throughout the world: post-industrial landscape, walkable infrastructure, and open spaces. It is gritty and inspiring.

Rivertown’s built environment lends itself to the creation of community. It just lacks people. Implement the vision of Freetown Detroit, and the people will come.

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Altiora Petimus

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This is a pivotal moment in the history of cities. The rapid change brought upon by massive urbanization in an era of globalization challenges entrenched power and uproots the least powerful people among us. Yet alterurbanism represents a divergent stream of social change, one of hope and reclamation. As example after example shows, communities that are engaged in the creation of their own future succeed time and time again when they tap into their own resourcefulness.

But one point needs clarification: alterurbanism does not disparage the visionary capabilities of architects and urban planners. What it resists, instead, are mass-scale actions that refuse to acknowledge the assets and capabilities of existing communities. Architects and planners are still absolutely vital in the alterurban world, but they need to practice acupuncture rather than surgery. Targeted, precise plans are required to strengthen communities and create cities in the alterurban mold. Architects and planners can also play a leading role by using their expertise to assess what the community’s assets actually are. As we saw in the slums of Caracas, what was thought by the community to be a liability was an asset in the eye of the designer. It was through dialogue, not dictates, that the community flourished Further, the power of difference is crucial in our global world. Modernism asserted an international style that could be constructed in any locality regardless of context, and so cities started to look and feel the same. But for cities to be competitive for the hearts and bodies of creative workers in an informational economy, they need to offer something unique. The global city need not be a collection of placeless streets and glass and steel towers. As such, placemaking should be at the center of both urban planning and architectural design, with each development providing some contribution to its context. The city should be a kaleidoscopic experience.

Lastly, alterurbanism is not the end of history. It too will have its excesses and overreaches, just as all philosophies and social forms do. Later generations will surely have to fix the mess that we have created. The cycle will move onward and double back upon itself. The human race will continue to grapple ever forward toward some elusive Eden. The wheel will still spin. It is, after all, in our nature to seek higher things.

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END NOTES Green, 10.

Garden Cities of Tomorrow became the basis of post-war British town planning, and nearly one million residents lived in Garden Cities at their peak of popularity. The Garden City concept has been adopted in places as divergent as Sunnyside, Queens and Bangalore, India 3 The entire project of the Soviet Union could be viewed as an attempt to impose an ill-defined Utopia from the top down.

4Richard Sennet was a long discussion about the importance of Parisian Café culture in The Fall of Public Man. 5 Hardt and Negri’s Empire trilogy is a contemporary classic of political theory. This thesis is largely in dialogue with the ideas expressed in those books.

6 Geoffrey Pleyers’ Alter-Globalization is an excellent overview of these alternative globalizing forces.

7 Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and Social Hope and Achieving Our Country are well worth reading for anyone interested in the pragmatic politics of social liberation.

8 Buckminster Fuller in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7OBTiyMoSE 9 Gilbert, 18 10 NON-SPACE is the term used by Marc Auge to refer to the places of transience that are not significant enough to be considered places unto themselves. JUNKSPACE is Rem Koolhass’ similar term that refers to the spaces that are defined of social detritus.

11 Badenhausen, Kurt. "America's Most Miserable Cities." Forbes. 30 Jan. 2008.

12 Segrue, 17 13 United States. Census Bureau. "1910", "1920", "1950", and "2010" Web. <census.gov>.

14 Jacobs, 204.

15 Segru, 106 16 Segrue, 3.

17 Harvey, 98 18 Weiwei, Ai. "The City: Beijing." The Daily Beast. Newsweek/Daily Beast, 28 Aug. 2011. Web. 10 Mar. 2012. <http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/08/28/ai-weiwei-on-beijing-s-nightmare-city.html>.

19 For a more in depth discussion about the cyclical nature of history based on generational relationships see The Forth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe 20 These archetypes are Prophets, Nomads, Heroes, and Artists.

21 Dr. Ron Wimberley, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at NC State; Dr. Libby Morris, director of the Institute of Higher Education at the University of Georgia; and Dr. Gregory Fulkerson, a sociologist at NC State.

22 Hardt and Negri 2009, 250 23 This is a truncated summary of the political formulation of Hardt and Negri.

24 http://www.gallup.com/poll/145760/satisfaction-gov-morality-economy-down.aspx 25 Hardt and Negri 2004, 99.

26 Negri, 23 27 Museum exhibition. Curator: Cynthia E. Smith. Design with the Other 90% Cities. United Nations 28 Helms, Matt. "8 New Casinos Proposed: Long Shot or Good Bet for Michigan?" Detroit Free Press. 1 Apr. 2012. Web. 1 Apr. 2012. <http://www.freep.com/article/20120401/NEWS06/204010485/8-new-casinos-proposed-Long-shot-or-good-bet-for-Michigan->.

29 http://datadrivendetroit.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/PctOwnOccHsg08BG.pdf http://www.indexmundi.com/facts/united-states/quick-facts/new-york/homeownership-rate#map 30 Dietz, Thomas, Elinor Ostrom, and Paul C. Stern. "The Struggle to Govern the Commons." Science 302.5652 (2003): 1907-912. Print.

31 Elinor Ostrom Identifies 8 principles for effective longterm commons management: 1. Clearly defined boundaries. 2. Congruence between appropriation rules and provision rules and local conditions. 3. Collective choice arrangements. 4. Monitoring. 5. Graduated Sanctions. 6. Conflict Resolution Mechanisms. 7. Minimum recognition of rights to organize. 8. Nest enterprises.

32 Klein, Naomi and Yotam Marom. “Why Now? What’s Next? Naomi Klein and Yotam Marom in Conversation About Occupy Wall Street.” The Nation. 9 Jan. 2012.

33 Negri, 26 34 Howard, 10 35 Hobson and Marvin March 2009, 195 36 “The entire range of living matter on Earth, from whales to viruses, and from oaks to algae, could be regarded as constituting a single living entity, capable of manipulating the Earth’s atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts...We have defined Gaia as a complex entity involving the Earth’s biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic systems which seeks optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet” Lovelock, 9-10.

37 This does not imply agency, just as the body need not understand its aims when it sends white blood cells to fight disease. The point is that the systems are by their very nature self sustaining.

38 See “Are We Now Living in the Anthropocene” edited by Jan Zalasiewicz of the Geological Society of America for a more in depth discussion of the extent of human impact on geology.

39 Hodson and Marvin June 2010, 3.

40 Register, 31 41 Wines, 28 42"The Plant." The Plant. Web. 1 Apr. 2012. <http://www.plantchicago.com/>.

43 http://www.sfenvironment.org/our_sfenvironment/press_releases.html?topic=details&ni=640 44 "Via Verde." Via Verde. Web. 21 Mar. 2012. <http://www.viaverdenyc.com/the_building>.

45Kalish, Jon. "'The Gift Of Detroit': Tilling Urban Terrain." NPR. NPR, 02 Oct. 2011. Web. 3 Apr. 2012. <http://www.npr.org/2011/10/02/140903516/the-gift-of-detroit-tilling-urban-terrain>.

46 Gallagher, John. "MSU Proposes 100 Acre, $100 Million Urban-farming Research Center in Detroit." Detroit Free Press [Detroit] 13 Apr. 2012. Detroit Free Press. 13 Apr. 2012. Web. 47 Lewis, Mark. "Businessman Pitches Urban Farm Proposal for Detroit." Crain's Detroit Business [Detroit] 02 Apr. 2009. Print.

48 Howard, 104.

1 2

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Eco-Town Prospectus, 12 Lessig, 47 51 Glaeser, 71 52 Bollier,.14 53 Loukaitou-Sideris, 278.

54 Hyde, 27.

55 http://pewinternet.org/Trend-Data/Internet-Adoption.aspx 56 “A network is an abstract organizational model, in its broadest sense concerned only with the structure of relationships between things...Networks consist classically of nodes, or non-dimensional points of connection, and links, equally non-material connections that usually conform to one of several organizational typologies, such as centralized, distributed, bus or mesh, which effect the nature of the relationships they embody and how they may be analyzed and understood.” Network Practices “Introduction” by Anthony Burke and Therese Tiernery p. 25 57 Castells, p.1 58 See Adam’s Smith’s The Wealth of Nations 59 http://codeforamerica.org/what-we-do/ 60Museum exhibition. Curator: Cynthia E. Smith. Design with the Other 90% Cities. United Nations 61 http://datadrivendetroit.org/ 62 Calvino, 11.

63 All information about the Green Garage was relayed by Jason Peet, Operations Manager, in a personal interview on 25 April, 2012.

64 All information about Roosevelt Park Revival was relayed by Cassie DeWitt, Board of Directors, in a personal interview on 26 April, 2012 65 Shepardson, David. "Woodward Light-rail Group to Pay Some Operating Costs, Raises Cost Estimate." Detroit News [Detroit] 23 Apr. 2012. The Detroit News 49 50

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