To: Permaculture ibiblio <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: [permaculture] Food Among the Ruins
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 2009 00:12:53 -0400
Food Among the Ruins
by Mark Dowie
Guernica - a magazine of art and politics <http://www.guernicamag.com/>
August, 2009
Mark Dowie is an investigative historian living in Point Reyes Station,
California.
*Excerpt:*
“There are more visionaries in Detroit than in most Rust-Belt cities,
and thus more visions of a community rising from the ashes of a moribund
industry to become, if not an urban paradise, something close to it. The
most intriguing visionaries in Detroit, at least the ones who drew me to
the city, were those who imagine growing food among the ruins—chard and
tomatoes on vacant lots (there are over 103,000 in the city, sixty
thousand owned by the city), orchards on former school grounds,
mushrooms in open basements, fish in abandoned factories, hydroponics in
bankrupt department stores,
livestock grazing on former golf courses, high-rise farms in old hotels,
vermiculture, permaculture, hydroponics, aquaponics, waving wheat where
cars were once test-driven, and winter greens sprouting inside the
frames of single-story bungalows stripped of their skin and re-sided
with Plexiglas—a homemade greenhouse. Those are just a few of the
agricultural technologies envisioned for the urban prairie Detroit has
become.”
“There are also proposals on the mayor’s desk to rezone vast sections
A-something (“A” for agriculture), and a proposed master plan that would
move the few people residing in lonely, besotted neighborhoods into
Detroit’s nine loosely defined villages and turn the rest of the city
into open farmland. An American Institute of Architects panel concludes
that all Detroit’s residents could fit comfortably in fifty square miles
of land. Much of the remaining ninety square miles could be farmed. Were
that to happen, and a substantial investment was made in greenhouses,
vertical farms, and aquaponic systems, Detroit could be producing
protein and fibre 365 days a year and soon become the first and only
city in the world to produce close to 100 percent of its food supply
within its city limits. No semis hauling groceries, no out-of-town truck
farmers, no food dealers. And no chain stores need move back. Everything
eaten in the city could be grown in the city and distributed to locally
owned and operated stores and co-ops. I met no one in Detroit who
believed that was impossible, but only a few who believed it would
happen. It could, but not without a lot of political and community will.”