Hello from Detroit, site of the 2010 US Social Forum and Allied Media Conference! I attended a remarkable opening session on Tuesday about the city’s local food movement, and want to share some of this experience because its themes are critically important to consider for those of us invested in the effort to change urban community food infrastructures.
The city of Detroit was built for 2 million people — but in the course of at least four decades of accelerated economic decay, its population has fallen well under half that. The city occupies 139 square miles; at least 40 square miles now lie abandoned. One fifth of Detroit residents don’t have access to transportation, period. The last major grocer in Detroit closed in 2007, leaving a vast desert spotted with “fringe markets” in corner stores (with few oases).
All of which points to a primary reason why the US Social Forum is hosted here: Detroit is “Ground Zero” for the various intersecting crises of post-industrial capitalism, including the crisis of our modern food infrastructure. The city’s struggle demands our attention — especially because of the many green shoots of renewal that can be found (for instance, an estimated 1,300 community gardens and farms).
One of the session’s speakers was Patrick Crouch of Earthworks, which works in conjunction with one of the city’s oldest soup kitchens. Earthworks engages in urban agriculture and community education, and is part of a network of activists working to reclaim community food sovereignty. For example, Patrick briefly described ongoing efforts to encourage Detroit’s fringe markets to source fresh local foods–similar to the Healthy Corner Stores project in DC.
Patrick’s role in this session, however, deliberately reflected his role in the community: as a white transplant to Detroit, Patrick works to support the leadership and sovereignty of Detroit’s indigenous black communities.
(Image here copped from the NYC Food Justice Coalition's blog, a great read on the Social Forum.)
Since 2006, such sovereignty has been formally represented by the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network (the acronymically vowel-free DBCFSN). Monica White, board member and professor at Wayne State University, explained that not only is Detroit’s population 85% black, but “there’s a long history of urban agriculture here — agrarian roots stretching back more than a century.”
And yet, Monica explained, as Detroit’s economic and structural collapse accelerated in the past decade, the food movement was gaining momentum — bringing a swell of foundations, developers, corporations and activists into the city, looking for paths of renewal. (A big-business proposal for massive conversion of vacant land into large-scale agriculture, for instance, is both breathtakingly ambitious and also fairly described as “reminiscent of a plantation.”) The Detroit Black Community Food Security Network formed to ensure that the indigenous community’s voice was not only at the table, but setting the agenda.
“Many food security activists have options for how to live their lives, and they opt to work for alternatives,” Monica noted. She assured the (largely white, young) crowd that such good intentions are appreciated; but good intentions and even hard work is still fundamentally insufficient for the objective of building true food sovereignty in a community.
The DBCFSN now operates a 2 acre farm, a community food buying club, and a youth mentorship program. Lila Cabil spoke of plans for a community-based grocery store that would also function as a community center, offering health, nutrition and fitness workshops and gathering space.
The Network was also instrumental in the development of Detroit’s Food Policy Council. They are also helping to develop a process for Community Benefit Agreements, would ensure that developers enter into contractual agreement with the community around matters of jobs, economic benefits and environmental impact of new projects in Detroit.
Amid all these initiatives, it became clear that urban food sovereignty can become, in the words of an audience member, “a vehicle for community autonomy.” And the scale of the crisis makes it more feasible to imagine truly radical solutions. Another world is possible, as goes the US Social Forum’s mantra.
The stakes are large. “As goes the food movement here in Detroit,” said one presenter, “so go food movements in the rest of the country.”
Indeed, despite different scales of economic crisis, there are striking similarities between Detroit and DC — in the eastern food deserts, in the burgeoning community garden scene, in non-profit offices, and even on the DC Food For All, which is contributed to largely by young white people of privilege who have transplanted to DC. We haven’t talked much (maybe not at all) about those racial dynamics here on the blog itself. Offline, however, many of us talk all the time about what it might take for this project to grow into a forum that’s truly of the community, rather than about the community. It’s not going to be easy, or quick. Yet at the moment I’m hopeful, inspired by the open, honest and deliberative dialogue happening here in Detroit. Next time I get a chance to write, I’ll share some of the ideas I’ve heard here about how allies can rededicate ourselves to the process of building relationships, establishing roles, and working together to build a different world.
