July’s issue of Harper’s Magazine contains a Letter from Michigan by Rebecca Solnit that starts out in the almost Soviet-style landscape of depressed, post-industrial Detroit. Titled “Detroit Arcadia: Exploring the post-American landscape,” the article moves unexpectedly to find emblems of optimism not in urban renewal, but in the city’s growing acceptance of wilderness and farmland in its midst.

Detroit was an emblem of the US’s manufacturing boom, particularly in the auto industry, and is now a symptom and a symbol of the industry’s American demise. “The city,” writes Solnit, “once the fourth largest in the country, is now so depopulated that some stretches resemble the outlying farmland and others are altogether wild. … Detroit is a cautionary tale about one-industry towns: it shrank the way the old boomtowns of the gold and silver rushes did, as though it had been mining automobiles and the veins ran dry, but most of those mining towns were meant to be ephemeral. People thought Detroit would go on forever.”

For her essay Solnit made repeated visits to Detroit, and catalogues the starting transformations of neighborhoods where beautiful old houses grace empty streets, next to empty lots where houses have been removed, “so thoroughly missing that no trace of foundation remains.” Strange pictures that could be from empty Nebraska farmtowns accompany a piece that paints the most comprehensive, thoughtful picture I’ve seen about urban Midwest America in a long time — maybe ever.

Detroit residents, what’s left of them, and the suburban residents who succumbed to “white flight” in the 1980s and 90s, point fingers to race, the auto industry, leadership, and hopelessness as causes for the city’s demise — it all depends on which category they see themselves as fitting into. But what makes Solnit’s Detroit portrait interesting is not the reasons for why, during the last two decades, “the city was falling apart, spectacularly and violently,” but what it is now doing to save itself.

Rather than focusing, as so many cities do, on tourism or bizarre concepts of urban revitalization or attracting new industry, Detroit has gone the Arcadia way: spurred by local politicians, Detroit residents are accepting the city’s “return to nature” and engaging in an urban greening that involves not tiny parks among busy streets, but acres of community gardens and schools that open out to working farms. This activity is the culmination of the vision of Jimmy Boggs, one of the city’s most influential leaders in the 1980s. “‘We have to get rid of the myth that there is something sacred about large-scale production for the national and international market,’” Solnit quotes him as saying in 1988. “‘We have to being thinking of creating small enterprises which produce food, goods, and services for the local market, that is, for our communities and for our city.’”

Harper’s specializes in trying to get its readers to look at the world in new ways. This article on Detroit is one of the most refreshing travel/environment pieces I’ve seen, although I’m not sure if its outlook is a little too optimistic. Still, Solnit’s conclusions leave me hoping: “Detroit is still beautiful, both in its stately decay and in its growing natural abundance. … This is the most extreme and long-term hope Detroit offers us: the hope that we can reclaim what we paved over and poisoned, that nature will not punish us, that it will welcome us home. … [Detroit] is a harsh place of poverty, deprivation, and a fair amount of crime, but it is also a stronghold of possibility.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 24th, 2007 at 11:45 am and is filed under Antonia projects, US travel, travel stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.