Motor City Green: A Century of Landscapes and Environmentalism in Detroit by Joseph Stanhope Cialdella (review)

Joseph Stanhope Cialdella's fine book, Motor City Green, relates a surprising tale that is perhaps not so surprising. Across the 130-year rise and decline history of America's archetypal industrial city, Detroiters—even the most economically challenged among them, immigrants and African Americans—insisted on relationships of various kinds with the natural world. Time and again, these efforts involved growing favored plants and food in their backyards and in neighboring vacant lots. "These gardens in the machine of industrial capitalism," he writes, "were where residents and city leaders through their outdoor spaces invented, contested, and defined ideas about urbanism, nature, and each other." (12)

Cialdella relates a series of episodes in five loosely connected chapters, beginning with Mayor Hazen S. Pingree's attempt to combat unemployment and poverty among Detroit's immigrant and working-class residents during the depression 1890s with a city program to use vacant lots for truck gardening. His second chapter looks at the Detroit Urban League's program in the 1920s to encourage residents of the city's African American neighborhoods, many of them recent Great Migration arrivals from the rural South, to acculturate to northern urban middle-class norms—and to win the respect of white middle-class Detroiters—by beautifying their homes and neighborhoods through more formal gardening. Whites often saw more black than green in these efforts, and many African Americans pursued their own alternative aesthetic and functional relationships with nature. In the early 1930s the Detroit Urban League and the Children's Fund of Michigan created a summer camp outside the city for African American children. For three decades, the camp organizers incorporated nature into activities designed to impart middle-class lessons to children in order to foster socio-economic mobility in their otherwise urban lives. Chapter four explores the problematic relationship between Detroit and the Huron-Clinton Metropolitan Authority (HCMA). Detroiters supplied the bulk of the funding to create nine regional parks in the suburbs between 1940 and 1970. Yet none of the parks were conveniently accessible to the city's residents, and the HCMA built no parks within the city. Meanwhile, the city struggled to maintain its own Belle Isle Park, a park used, not just by city residents, but by people from throughout the greater Detroit region, a telling reminder of the pervasive underlying racism that characterized relations between America's cities and suburbs in the postwar period.

Cialdella's final focus is on the rise of urban farming in Detroit, as the deindustrializing, depopulating city relinquished ever-larger amounts of the built-environment back to nature, which residents then converted to food production. This story is the most evocative of his examples, as twenty-first century urban visionaries, residents among them, reconceived the postindustrial city as a juxtaposition of city and country. "Gardens served as a starting point for imagining a new idea of the city," he writes, "where residents' gardening reconciled the devastating social and environmental effects of deindustrialization." (147)

Throughout the book, the evolution of Detroit's Frederick Olmsted-designed Belle Isle Park serves as an on-going reminder that relationships between city residents and nature were not all about city parks. "My aim," Cialdella argues, "is … putting urban gardening and agriculture into conversation with more widely studied topics in cultural and social history such as park building, city planning, and the politics of metropolitan development." (10) He succeeds. Indeed, one of the virtues of the book is the deft integration of perspectives from environmental, social, cultural, and political history. Race is an important part of Cialdella's narrative, as it must be, and he addresses it forthrightly, but it never overpowers his primary focus on people expressing their ideas of community through nature. He shows us that these ideas, and the actual relationships that resulted, came from the top down, the bottom up, and from the middle; compelling, but perhaps...