by David Pertuz
Detroit is a city long at home with destruction and rebirth, building and rebuilding, invention and reinvention. The city's first destruction, by fire in 1805, was complete; but so was its rebirth, which would eventually reach the limits of imagination to become the city where everything was possible, and the possible was rendered concrete. Its second death, by contrast, has been slow and painful, and known around the world. But it has also been no more than partial--Detroit does mind dying, dammit.
Once home to two million people, Detroit now houses barely 850,000. The empty or abandoned land could host the island of Manhattan. Healthy neighborhoods that were once part of a dense urban fabric often find themselves now surrounded by abandonment or decline. As in a fractal, you see the same pattern when you look more closely--city neighborhoods in some places have only a handful of houses remaining on one block, while the next appears whole. In a city whose neighbors, neighborhoods and communities may be physically isolated, where infrastructure and city support are crumbling, its people compensate by tying themselves to others like them.
Often, the level of community involvement within a neighborhood can be the biggest factor that determines whether or not that neighborhood survives. As families come with rich uncles and poor cousins, so Detroit has living neighborhoods and dying neighborhoods. Some are still rapidly declining; some, like Delray, are all but gone; some are just hanging on; some, like parts of the Cass Corridor and the New Center, are renewing; some, like Indian Village and Lafayette Park, have remained strong.
The rest of the world seems only recently to have discovered Detroit, hiding in plain sight in the glossy, metallic success that surrounds it, rendered invisible by its shabbiness and others' indifference. But few of these avenues of rebirth and redefinition are truly new--they have been present for years in the efforts of the city's supporters.
Garden City
Few people outside the region may know, for example, that Detroit is home to many dozens of community gardens of all sizes, serving many needs, as well as an incipient urban farming movement. It is home to an intensely resourceful and creative artistic community that draws inspiration from what the city was--and also from what it can be. It is home to a burgeoning community of cyclists of all types that can revel in the broad streets built for cars but no longer filled by them.
Detroit's urban gardens take many forms--some are the work of families, primarily for their own benefit; some are the work of individuals for the benefit of their neighborhood; and others are the work of collectives of volunteers. They often arise out of obvious and sometimes urgent needs: Detroit is a food desert, often with no grocery stores for miles around; it is also very poor. Urban gardens and small farms can be the only source of fresh produce available to poor and isolated neighborhoods, whose residents lack the cars required to get them even to Eastern Market.
Gardens have also served as a means to tie people and communities together. The Greening of Detroit, the Detroit Agriculture Network and the Earthworks Urban Farm/Capuchin Soup Kitchen form a collective that supports urban gardening and farming in the city. In Corktown, Gregg and Angela Newsom put on monthly community Sunday brunches, at which everyone is welcome, and which draw people from all over the city. And, on an entirely different scale, businessman John Hantz has been buying vacant land for a large-scale farming initiative on the east side.
Where the Bicycle Reigns
Detroit is, in some ways, an unexpected place for cycling, so deep is its association with the automobile. Yet, paradoxically, this historical focus on cars has combined with its population decline to make it an almost ideal canvas for a cycling city. Its vast multilane radial boulevards and side streets alike now contain a small fraction of the automobile traffic they were built for, leaving plenty of room for cyclists to ride freely, relatively unthreatened by frantic traffic. Though it could be said, for this reason, to need it less than other cities, Detroit is finally getting cycling infrastructure, thanks to the efforts of people like Todd Scott, Greenways Coordinator for the Michigan Trails & Greenways Alliance.
Cycling in Detroit has many faces; one is as a vehicle for youth education and outreach. The Cass Corridor is home to The Hub of Detroit, a co-op bike shop. Its profits serve Back Alley Bikes, their outlet for such efforts as youth earn-a-bike programs, youth mechanics' training programs, holiday childrens' bike giveaways, and adult shop training classes. Originally founded as an offshoot of Detroit Summer, it is a fixture of the neighborhood and is also the only full-service bike shop in the city.
Another is as a means to be physically engaged with and discover the city. Detroit Bikes!, a project of Detroit Synergy created by young architect Alex Froehlich, has led free bicycle tours of the city since 2006. Each ride, organized around a different neighborhood or theme, offers an intimate view of a different area of the city. There are other rides--rides led out of the Wheelhouse, Detroit's riverfront bike rental and service shop; the Saturday early-morning Beat the Train ride led by Detroiter Andy Staub; monthly Critical Mass rides; and the biggest ride, the Tour de Troit, an annual 30-mile tour of the city every September that has grown in only a handful of years from about 100 riders to over 3000.
Elsewhere in the city, the Dequindre Cut, a pedestrian & bicycle pathway in a formerly disused and derelict railway channel, now gives Detroiters an off-street route from the riverfront to Eastern Market. And on the northeast side, volunteers have begun refurbishing and holding informal events at the Dorais Velodrome, a track built in the late 60s in a city park but abandoned for decades until a group of individuals dubbed themselves "The Mower Gang" and took it on themselves and their lawn-care equipment to attempt to revive the site. There was no one around to tell them not to, after all.
Small Town Feel, Big City Bureaucracy
Detroit can often be a city where, seemingly, everyone knows everyone else; even strangers may know who you are. A man whose bicycle I was admiring outside the Honeybee market in southwest Detroit one summer Saturday in 2008 told me he recognized me by my own bicycle because he had seen me riding up and down E. Jefferson countless times. This tends to give it the feel of a very large small town. It is this natural and sometimes inevitable connectedness that makes Detroit an easy city for people who are interested, and newly arrived, to own their own share of making a difference.
Detroit is also a place where, often, you will be left alone by officialdom. This can be malign--decades' worth of evidence is most anywhere--but it can also be beneficial. Detroit's sometimes vast vacant spaces--40 square miles' worth--present vast opportunities. It is a place for lifetime residents to reuse empty lots on their blocks by turning them into gardens; for artists to create innovative studios in forgotten neighborhoods; for architects to experiment with green houses; and on and on.
But the city government seems, at times, to have a schizophrenic relationship with the agents of its rebirth. It has people like Kathryn Underwood, a planner for the City Planning Commission who has been actively supporting urban agriculture for at least 10 years. At the same time, it seems randomly to emerge from its cluelessness to attempt to shut down community-born projects for non-compliance with regulations as soon as it discovers them in the press--years after they've become common knowledge. Tyree Guyton's Heidelberg Project was the subject of repeated attempts at destruction until it was eventually accepted and finally embraced. And just last month the city forced Theatre Bizarre, the annual underground Halloween party, to leave its home at the State Fairgrounds barely a week before the event for lack of permits. Adherence to laws is an important part of a city that works, but perhaps the city can more often find creative, flexible ways to work with its artists.
The success of many new small businesses that entrepreneurs have opened in the city in the last decade is all the more remarkable for the bureaucratic obstacles that await them. But new entrepreneurs setting up businesses will likely find themselves being actively aided, sometimes without asking, by the very people who, in other places, would be no more than competitors. A handful of local businesses cooperated in 2009 to create Detroit Cheers, a local currency to help keep money earned in the city spent there. The city's communitarian and interdependent nature is, I think, the spiritual center of its reinvention.
Detroit is home to Grace Lee Boggs, a lifelong community activist and founder of Detroit Summer, a center for youth leadership, creative expression, collective action and community development. But for every better-known person like Boggs, there are dozens of everyday, yet still extraordinary, people--Billie & Bill Hickey, Jen Ruud, Tom Page, Shane Bernardo, to name a few whom I know--who contribute to the betterment of the city through their own efforts in urban gardening, volunteer organizing, bicycle advocacy and youth mentoring.
But Detroit's teenage trying-on of new identities cannot mature into a robust adulthood solely on the efforts of hopeful and determined activists who move to the city. As important as they are, Detroit's second adolescence of self-definition can only, I think, succeed with the active involvement of those people who have spent their lives in the city. I am talking about those for whom, in many cases, the city is a place that they live in simply because they don't have the means to leave, and whose trajectory has always been a part of their lives. Nor can Detroit mature on the backs of entrepreneurs, single people, and childless young couples. Mayor Dave Bing realizes that the city cannot be healthy without a strong middle class: and middle-class families have, for decades, been the biggest source of the city's continuing population exodus.
Reversing the slide is probably the city's biggest challenge--and it is inevitable that the population will decline further. But among those who stay, whether because they choose to or because they have to, there are plenty of signs of hope in the everyday actions of everyday citizens. There are the parents who organize to ensure safe routes to school for neighborhood children; neighbors mowing empty lots and picking up illegally dumped trash; the group of men in a northeast side neighborhood who use their bicycle club to help neighborhood children with their own bicycles; The Detroit Parent Network, a nonprofit initiative to help teach better parenting. The common theme is one of people organizing on their own to help create a better future for themselves.
Detroit is a city that I dearly love, not just despite all of its obvious problems, but also because of its soul. My body may have left, but my heart hasn't. As its decline has been incomplete, so is its rebirth also incomplete. It is often nascent, halting, tentative. But the roots of its survival and rebirth are deep, and are fed by the hearts and bodies of the many people who love it, and must, or choose to, call it their home. They are the embodiment of its motto, Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cinebus.
Links:
Heidelberg Project
Text and photos by David Pertuz
