Another world is possible: a view from Detroit
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.
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.
(Image here copped from the NYC Food Justice Coalition’s blog, a great read on the Social Forum.)
