A very interesting article by Rebecca Solnit, one of my favorite writers. I had no idea she was interested in Detroit. I did finally learn from the article what the Greening of Detroit park on Jefferson just east of the Ren Cen is all about . . .
http://www.greeningofdetroit.com/index2.htm Fred ------------------- http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070620/COL04/706200350/1085 BRIAN DICKERSON The shining city at the world's end June 20, 2007 BY BRIAN DICKERSON FREE PRESS COLUMNIST "The continent has not seen a transformation like Detroit's since the last days of the Maya," urban archeologist Rebecca Solnit writes in her cheery "Letter from Michigan," which appears in the July issue of Harper's magazine. "The city, once the fourth-largest in the nation, is now so depopulated that some stretches resemble the outlying farmland and others are altogether wild. ... Just about a third of Detroit, some 40 square miles, has evolved past decrepitude into vacancy and prairie -- an urban void the size of San Francisco." Um, gosh, Rebecca, that sounds kind of bleak. Any prospect of turning things around in the next century or two? Not really, Solnit says. "Dresden was rebuilt, and so was Hiroshima, and so were the cities destroyed by natural forces -- San Francisco and Mexico City and Tangshan -- but Detroit will never be rebuilt as it was," she predicts. "It will be the first of many cities forced to become altogether something else." Spelling the future E-I-E-I-O Now, Detroit has taken a lot of beatings in a lot of magazines -- including several more widely read than Harper's, which bills itself as the nation's oldest continuously published general-interest magazine but currently boasts about a fifth as many readers as Popular Mechanics. Still, the nerdy monthly has a reputation for being ahead of the curve, and Solnit's thesis -- that Detroit is on the verge of reinventing itself as a post-industrial agrarian paradise --is certain to create a stir among scholars who think about the future of urban life, not to mention serious gardeners. Solnit says she has been making regular visits to Detroit for several years now. She's seen the transformation of the downtown riverfront, the rise of permanent casinos and the "flush of gentility spreading around the Detroit Institute of Arts." But in the long run, she says, none of these will help Detroit reclaim its status as a player in the global economy. A model post-apocalyptic city It's when the global economy collapses -- a development she seems to regard as inevitable -- that Solnit sees Detroit making its move to the front of the pack. The "transnational webs of corporations and petroleum" will give way to a new, sustainable economic model in which small enterprises produce food, goods and services for the local market. Detroit, which by then will have returned large portions of its depopulated neighborhoods to farmland, will show the rest of the world's collapsing cities the way, Solnit predicts. "It is unfair, or at least deeply ironic, that black people in Detroit are being forced to undertake an experiment in utopian post- urbanism that appears to be uncomfortably close to the sharecropping past their parents and grandparents sought to escape," Solnit writes. But, she adds, "the rest of us will get there later, and by that time, Detroit may be the shining example we can look to," a post- industrial green city that feeds, clothes and entertains itself. Ours can be a world-class city again, Solnit says; we just have to wait until the rest of the world is in ruins.
