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Nearly ten years ago, when the first stirrings of a move towards urban farming in Detroit were barely visible, law professor and urbanologist John Mogk was the lead writer on an amazing article, “Promoting Urban Agriculture as an Alternative Land Use for Vacant Properties in the City of Detroit: Benefits, Problems, and Proposals.”
Mogk, who has served on too many boards and commissions to count, wrote it with two of his students as part of an effort to get the city to amend its zoning ordinance to permit urban agriculture, which Detroit did then do.
His article, published in the Wayne Law Review, concluded that the benefits to Detroit of urban agriculture would be immense. “No activity has greater potential for realizing economic justice than urban agriculture, if city land is made available on a widespread basis to residents to help meet their nutritional needs,” Mogk wrote.
Today, a growing set of urban pioneers is trying to make that happen, from Malik Yakini’s Black Community Food Security Network to Gary Wozniak’s Recovery Park.
It is hard to say how many people they have reached and helped and inspired to get involved themselves, but it is clearly a growing number. There are also more commercial efforts, and other developments like Hantz Woodlands on the East Side of Detroit, which seems likely to become the largest urban tree farm in America.
Back when he was running for mayor, I said something about the potential for farming in Detroit to Kwame Kilpatrick, who sort of snorted. His vision appeared to be that of a revived industrial metropolis with a population once again booming towards its postwar peak of something close to a million people. That didn’t make much sense in 2001, and it makes none now. Detroit was always geographically large by comparison with other cities.
You could fit Manhattan and Boston and Seattle within its 139 square mile borders, and have room left over. Today Detroit has maybe 670,000 people, just a little over one-third of its peak population. There may be close to 40 square miles of vacant land.
As Mogk and his students noted in their article. “The city of Detroit can no longer afford to maintain the vast amount of vacant land it owns. At the same time,” they noted “Detroit is faced with a void of nutrition combined with high rates of crime and vandalism.”
Urban agriculture, they admit, “is not a panacea for all of the Detroit’s problems, but it does address many of the city’s problems through a single comprehensive program.”
They concluded, “the benefits of urban agriculture far outweigh its shortcomings. Where farming takes hold, Detroit will no longer need to spend money to secure, clean and maintain vacant property, because these properties will be returned to a productive, sustainable use.”
That’s starting to happen. Eventually, if and when urban farming really takes off, there may need to be safeguards against various types of exploitation, as well as checks to make sure crops aren’t being grown on dangerously contaminated land. But the potential is exciting.
Ironically, the classic booming industrial Detroit was largely the creation of the first Henry Ford, who grew up on a farm and hated rural life. Today, there must still be some elders in the city who fled farm work in Mississippi to come to Detroit.
They likely remember how to grow crops, and may have other knowledge today’s urban farmers need. Life does sometimes come full circle, after all.
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