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Detroit decline has also sparked remarkable creativity in its residents that is noticeable in the garden movement. Flickr User: ThunderKiss Photography

The time when Detroit flourished as the capital of the American car industry is no more than a distant memory. In a steady decline since the 1960s, Detroit’s economic collapse has been accelerated by the 2008 financial crisis. Full of abandoned buildings and car factories, much of the city looks like a hopeless ruin, yet a growing green movement is bringing new life and hope to Detroit by transforming the city through urban agriculture. Here is how urban gardening is renovating Motown and providing its residents with inexpensive fresh vegetables and fruits.

The Motor City has, perhaps, been hit harder than any other in the United States by poor urban planning, racial segregation, population loss and devalued property. In 1950, the population of Detroit peaked at 1.8 million, whereas today it only stands at 900,000, leaving hundreds of thousands of houses empty. Between 1970 and 2000, Jeff Byles reported in his essayDisappeared Detroit, which was published in Lost Magazine, “More than 161,000 dwellings were demolished in Detroit, amounting to almost one-third of the city’s occupied housing stock. That’s more than the total number of occupied dwellings today in the entire city of Cincinnati.” With acurrent unemployment rate of 15.5 percent, more than 50 percent higher than the national average, and the title of the most dangerous city in the US, the former “Capital of the car industry” no longer attracts new residents or developers.

For those who stay in the city, it is nearly impossible to find fresh vegetables and fruits as allsupermarket chains in the area closed, making Detroit a food desert. A study from Yale’s Rudd Center recently found that Detroit residents are “statistically more likely to suffer or die prematurely from a diet-related disease, holding other key factors constant,” due to the severely limited access to healthy food.

The city of Detroit is considered one of the worst "food deserts" in the country. More than half a million city dwellers live in areas where it's easier to find a fast-food restaurant than it is to find a grocery store selling fresh produce. Flickr User: Ario_

Researchers from the C.S. Mott Group reckon that there are 44,000 vacant publicly-owned land parcels, representing nearly 5,000 acres around the city. These vacant lands gave Detroit citizens the inspiration to create their own urban gardens, providing them with the necessary amount of fresh food produce they need. More and more urban farms and kitchen gardenshave been sprouting up throughout the whole city since 1980. According to the association The Greening of Detroit, in partnership with The Garden Resource Program, Detroit has more than 15,000 urban gardeners of all ages and 1200 registered vegetable gardens.

This green initiative of urban agriculture plays an important role in Detroit; it provides fresh vegetables and fruits to Detroit citizens on the cheap, while improving the quality of life for the local communities and the city with the conversion of vacant lots into urban gardens. However, a main obstacle remains against the expansion of urban agriculture in Motown: legally, farming can’t be the principal use of city land. Therefore all urban gardeners’ activities are currently considered illegal by the City Council.  But this is changing thanks to the close collaboration between the Detroit Food Policy Council and the City of Detroit that has recently committed to support sustainable food systems that provide people easy access to fresh food produce. Therefore, it’s now easier for Detroit urban gardeners to sell their locally grown food at farmers’ markets, directly from to other urban dwellers.

The Motts Group researchers have shown that a mere 570 acres can produce 70 percent of the vegetables consumed in Detroit and 40 percent of the fruit. Thus if the Garden movement is still growing, the city will one day able to be self-sufficient. Flickr User: Jessicareeder

Urban gardening has a huge potential in Detroit and has already had an impact on the life andenvironmental quality of the urban dwellers. Thanks to this green initiative, the urban gardeners participate in the green revival of the City. The future of Motown is full of promises toward a new green model. Over the next several years, let’s hope Detroit will get the new nickname of Growtown because of its thousands of urban farms.

http://www.cereplast.com/a-green-recovery-how-urban-agriculture-is-renovating-the-city-of-detroit/