Detroit: Green Mecca?

The latest Harper’s Magazine has a really interesting article on Detroit by Rebecca Solnit, “a cautionary tale about one-industry towns.” She describes how you see a burned-out abandoned house next to a little house that someone is living in next to a couple of lots that are covered with grass, as if no houses were ever there.

Vast expanses of Detroit look just like that, like a ghost town, with Tiger Stadium abandoned and the train station unused for 20 years, all the windows broken. The population has declined vastly as the automotive industry has declined. In addition, many white families fled to the suburbs decades ago, giving Detroit an 80 or so percent black population now.

Writes Solnit, “The city, once the fourth largest in the country, is now so depopulated that some stretches resemble the outlying farmland and others are altogether wild.”

She observes that it’s common to have a city grow up where there hadn’t been one before, but almost unheard-of for the countryside to take a city back, as is happening in Detroit. She says while Detroit’s suburbs may become unsustainable when we run out of oil, the city itself may be in the vanguard of urban farming for local food production, which it is now uniquely suited for. One woman bought the vacant lots around her for a small amount of money, and now grows much of her own food on her land.

Solnit: “Detroit may be the shining example we can look to, the post-industrial green city that was once the steel-gray capital of Fordist manufacturing.”

Speaking of Detroit, once upon a time, before there were cell phones, my mother’s car broke down on a Detroit freeway at night when she was all by herself. Did I ever mention this before? She sat in the car and mentally rehearsed the steps she would take to switch to the spare tire, and then she got out of the car and changed the tire and drove home. I feel anxious every time I think of my mother hopping out of her car in the urban wasteland at night, even though I know the story has a happy ending.

The most anxious I ever was on a freeway, besides the time the man in Dallas was deliberately tailgating and veering very close to the side of my car, was in St. Louis, when I was driving across the country with one of my relatives. We exited the freeway for some reason or other and were immediately lost in a creepy deserted industrial zone with no sign of an on-ramp. When I described the experience later, my father said he knew just what I meant; he’d had a similar experience there.

As for the thing in Dallas, which happened on another leg of the same trip, I waited until it was nearly too late to take an exit to the right, and then suddenly left the freeway via that exit, thus parting from my new friend.