Green Acres in the Motor City

313. It’s a number that once signaled a place of power. When the U.S. area code system was developed in late 1950s, the rotary dial was the dominant phone technology, and the most important locales got the plum digits on the low end of the circle. Manhattan, naturally, is the easiest to dial: a laser-like 212. Los Angeles got 213 and 312. The capital code is an economical, stately 202. Detroit, then the epicenter of U.S. manufacturing, grabbed 313 — a numerical assignment that reflected its economic might. At the time, the Motor City had a population of 1.8 million people. Today, fewer than one million people live there.

Detroit is our first modern ghost city. I have been to Detroit three or four times, and each time I went there I was shocked by how hollow the place is. Travel downtown and you’re likely to come across a 10- or 12-story office building from 50 or 60 years ago that once must have been lovely with all of its late-Deco stylings. Now it’s abandoned. And next to it is another grand tower just like it, also dark and silent. In the neighborhoods surrounding the commercial center stand large, brick manses curtained with weeds.

The abandonment of the place has served for years as the perfect canvas for magazine writers seeking to understand the implosion of American manufacturing. More important for those who still live there, the desertion of Detroit is the ideal setup for the one of the most vibrant urban farming scenes in the United States. A constellation of at least 1,200 school gardens, community gardens, and micro farms thrive amid the estimated 103,000 vacant lots. The place is bursting with fruits and vegetables. (You can read more about it here and here.)

At the center of the city’s farming movement is the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network. I got the chance to talk with the group’s chairman, Malik Yakini, when I was in Washington, D.C. last week for a conference sponsored by Campus Progress, the youth wing of the Center for American Progress. I was there wearing my Earth Island Journal editor’s hat to speak about climate change. Yakini was on a panel titled “The Force of Food,” and the turnout at his session was yet more proof of the strength of the sustainable food movement: About 60 students turned out for the talk on climate change; the food session, in contrast, attracted a standing-room-only audience of close to 100.

To get a sense of why food and farming has become the vanguard of the larger ecological sustainability movement, just listen to what Yakini told the students in D.C.: “There are no simple solutions to complex problems. We have to mobilize the people in the community who are really impacted to grow their own food,” he said. “ “As people grow their own food, they gain a sense of their own power — and we nurture that.”

Yakini is exactly right. As I’ve written about before, the food movement is so attractive to people for several reasons: It’s physical and visceral, it’s positive and hopeful, and it is, at the end of a day in the garden, a confirmation for people of their own power as individuals. I was eager to hear more about Yakini’s work in the Detroit urban farming community, so I invited him for a quick interview.

“We’re concerned about the lack of access to fresh produce in Detoit,” Yakini told me. About 500,000 of Detroit’s 900,000 residents, he said, have no easy access to a full-service grocery. The technical term for this is a “food desert.” But Yakini said he prefers the term “food swamp.” There’s plenty of calories available, after all, but it’s mostly junk food — fast food joints and corner stores (called “Party Stores” in Detroit) that sell booze, cigarettes, chips, soda, and packaged snacks. And when the corner stores do offer any real food, it’s typically well past its sell-by date: Brown vegetables and green meat.

“In terms of food access, we operate a two-acre farm in a city-owned park, we have a monthly food-buying club, and we spearheaded the creation of the Detroit Food Policy Council” he said.

The group’s second priority is public education, “raising people’s consciousness about the importance of controlling the food system in their own lives,” as he put it. To that end, the group has a youth program, called the Food Warriors, and works with the Detroit Public Library to host a regular speakers series.

The third element of the group’s work is encouraging economic and political strength in the city’s African-American communities. “Part of what we are trying to do is empower people, to let them see that they can shape their own future,” he said. “Typically when people see they can grow food, from seed to finished product, that simple act is empowering. It’s just that simple. You don’t need to have a lot of discussion about it.” … He later said: “Many people recognize that the food economy is the first economy. Even in impoverished areas, people have to buy food. If we can capture even 10 percent of that food dollar, and re-circulate it in the community, that has tremendous potential to be an economic engine and create jobs.”

Yakini recognizes that Detroit’s situation is in many ways unique, and that its potential to serve as a model for other cities is limited. The city, of course, has far more available land than most other major metropolises; the African-American majority still has a cultural connection to agricultural traditions; and urban farming in the city has enjoyed political support since as early as the 1970s, when Coleman Young, Detroit’s first Black mayor, launched the “Farm a Lot” program to provide technical support to growers.

But Yakini told me that even if other cities can’t practice urban agriculture on the same scale as Detroit, they can gain the same benefits. And perhaps the most important of those is growing racial and social justice.

“For me, this work is part of the larger work of creating social justice,” Yakini said. “I don’t look at the food work in isolation. The food work has been very optimistic for me because it has the potential to bring together people of different races, classes, and genders, because everyone eats. It’s something people can connect to in a very concrete way. People have a real emotional connection to food. It’s not abstract.”

Or, put another way: Sow hope, reap justice.

Photo Credit: Bob Jagendorf via Flickr