Guernica finds Detroit chock full of visionaries and urban farming.
Excerpt:
There are more visionaries in Detroit than in most Rust-Belt cities,
and thus more visions of a community rising from the ashes of a
moribund industry to become, if not an urban paradise, something close
to it. The most intriguing visionaries in Detroit, at least the ones
who drew me to the city, were those who imagine growing food among the
ruins—chard and tomatoes on vacant lots (there are over 103,000 in the
city, sixty thousand owned by the city), orchards on former school
grounds, mushrooms in open basements, fish in abandoned factories,
hydroponics in bankrupt department stores, livestock grazing on former
golf courses, high-rise farms in old hotels, vermiculture,
permaculture, hydroponics, aquaponics, waving wheat where cars were
once test-driven, and winter greens sprouting inside the frames of
single-story bungalows stripped of their skin and re-sided with
Plexiglas—a homemade greenhouse. Those are just a few of the
agricultural technologies envisioned for the urban prairie Detroit has
become.
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