The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit

Food Infill

Earthworks Urban Farm

The Earthworks Urban Farm is one of the largest urban agriculture initiatives in Detroit. It emerged from an intersection of two conditions: first, the desire of Capuchin friars and associated volunteers to feed and otherwise assist needy residents in Detroit's impoverished Eastside, and second, the availability of large plots of vacant urban land on the Eastside for non-profit community service activities.

Earthworks was initiated in 1997 as a garden located adjacent to the Capuchin Soup Kitchen. This soup kitchen not only served healthy meals, but also distributed food, clothes and furniture to needy families, provided showers and a change of clothes to homeless people, and offered substance abuse treatment programs, a children's art therapy studio and a children's library.

Originally cultivating produce for the soup kitchen, Earthworks expanded a few years later to a .75 acre site several blocks away, behind the Gleaners Community Food Bank, and began to distribute its yield at weekly markets hosted at Eastside health clinics. In subsequent years, Earthworks also began process produce into such products as canned tomatoes, pickled beets and jams, as well as honey and beeswax hand balm made from bee hives situated on the roof of the food bank. In addition, it added a greenhouse where seedlings are grown for use both by Earthworks and for gardens of local families, communities, and schools that participate in the Garden Resource Program Collaborative. In 2008, Earthworks began to host monthly community potlucks where food justice issues are advanced and discussion groups with patrons of the soup kitchen are held.

Just like the Capuchin Soup Kitchen, with its diverse assemblage of service programs, Earthworks assembles a diverse array of agricultural programs into a single urban institution. The complexity of this assemblage, indexing perceived social needs, exploits openings in both space (a vacant lot becoming a farm, a roof becoming an aviary) and in time (dinners becoming activist discussion groups and community-building occasions). The filling of these openings creates, in turn, opportunity to facilitate new models of food consumption, community and urban environment.

D-Town Farm

The D-Town Farm is an urban farm in the Rouge Park neighborhood operated by the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network. The Network was started as a response to a number of food-related issues in Detroit's predominantly African-American population: the lack of grocery stores in many neighborhoods in Detroit; the replacement of home-cooked meals by fast food in many African-American families; and the dependence of those families, and the communities they are part of, on distant others for their sustenance.

The D-Town Farm was developed by the Network as part of a larger project to provide food security, which the Network defines as “easy access to adequate amounts of affordable, nutritious, culturally appropriate food.” The farm sits on a two-acre site on the City of Detroit's Meyer Tree Nursery, which the city agreed to let the Network use for ten years. The farm includes organic vegetable plots, two beehives, a hoop house for year-round food production, and a composting operation. Produce from the farm is sold at the farm itself, at Eastern Market, and at farmers' markets throughout Detroit; it is also distributed through the Ujamaa Cooperative Food Buying Club, which the Network also operates. The farm's activities are presented publically in a number of formats, including an annual Harvest Festival and the Food Warriors Youth Development Program, in which elementary school students at three African-centered schools (Aisha Shule, Nsoromma Institute and Timbuktu Academy) are introduced to urban agriculture.

Through the D-Town Farm and allied programs, solutions to food insecurity have intersected with a range of other issues and sponsored a range of other effects; the farm is a site of community-building, collective-identity formation and political action, as well as agricultural production. The Network's response to food insecurity has thus cascaded into responses to other problems, not all of which are food-related, facing Detroit's African-American population.

Georgia Street Community Garden

The Georgia Street Community Garden was started by Mark Covington, who grew up in the Eastside neighborhood around the garden's site. Covington began to spend more time in the neighborhood after he was laid off from his job in 2008. His effort to clear garbage from three city-owned vacant lots next to his grandmother's house soon evolved into a project to cultivate those lots as a community garden for the neighborhood, where many families face food insecurity. The garden, mainly planted in vegetables, is tended by both neighborhood children and a network of volunteers drawn from across Detroit and its suburbs; the garden serves as a nexus for the formation of new social networks as well as a new means of food security.

Taking advantage of unreal estate's openness to occupation and redefinition, the Georgia Street Community Garden is also a platform for a variety of neighborhood-based events, actions and initiatives. The garden has thus become a venue for collective children's book readings, family film nights, and public barbeques. It has also become part of a broader project of neighborhood revitalization; the Georgia Street Community Garden Association has acquired abandoned buildings adjacent to the garden from the City of Detroit and plans to convert them into a corner market and community center.

Brightmoor Farmway

Brightmoor is a neighborhood in Northwest Detroit with large numbers of abandoned buildings and vacant lots. The neighborhood's growth was spurred in the beginning of the 20th century by the nearby development of auto industry facilities; its decline was reciprocally spurred by the post-war suburbanization of those same facilities. As the neighborhood's working-class residents left to find employment elsewhere, their houses were sold to landlords. In weak-market conditions, these houses were cheaply rented, leading to further downturns in property values. In combination with a national economic slowdown, a local epidemic of crack cocaine use, and an upsurge of gang violence, Brightmoor's decline became precipitous in the 1980s.

Around one quarter of all property in Brightmoor is currently vacant. In recent years, some neighborhood residents have come to perceive this vacancy as offering a precious opportunity to self-organize the development of their community. This perception led to the founding of a series of gardens and pocket parks on vacant lots. In the summer of 2009, a consortium of community organizations then began to plan the linkage of these gardens and parks by a neighborhood-scale “farmway.” As this farmway developed, it has come to include not only a path connecting around 20 existing gardens, but also new pocket parks, new community gardens, a wildflower garden, an orchard and a market garden for neighborhood youth. The farmway both joins these self-organized projects to one another and also joins them to Eliza Howell Park, an existing public green space in the neighborhood. In so doing, the farmway has created a neighborhood infrastructure that connects agricultural and cultural spaces, planned and informal initiatives, and sites of food production and food consumption, all taking place on readily available unreal estate.

Peaches and Greens

In response to the food insecurity that many low-income residents of central Detroit experience, the Central Detroit Christian Community Development Corporation initiated Peaches and Greens to make fresh produce available to residents of the central Woodward neighborhood. Enhancing the neighborhood's access to nutritious food, the project has also facilitated the development of new kinds of political agency and the emergence of new cultural practices.

The Peaches and Greens Market was founded in a former dry cleaners, purchased at a Wayne County property auction. Opened in the fall of 2008, the market provides a place for residents to buy fresh fruit and vegetables at affordable prices; it also buys produce from local gardeners, thereby empowering these gardeners as food producers. In addition, the market was envisioned as a wholesale distribution point where fresh produce could be sold to the liquor stores, party stores and corner markers that serve as primary grocery stores for many neighborhood residents. Recruiting local youth to canvas these stores and establish commercial links between them and Peaches and Greens, the market thereby assists in the transformation of food consumers into food activists.

The Peaches and Greens Market has been augmented by the re-purposing of a former UPS delivery truck into a mobile produce market. Mimicking the motion of an ice-cream truck, the Peaches and Greens truck circulates slowly along streets in central Woodward, its loudspeaker playing rhythm and blues music and its interior containing shelves of fresh fruit and vegetables. Residents can either flag the truck down or arrange for it to deliver produce to their homes. In either case, produce consumption is transformed into a local ritual, specific to the Peaches and Greens community.

Field of Our Dreams

Field of Our Dreams is a mobile produce market serving the Eastside of Detroit. The market emerged from conversations at the Capuchin Soup Kitchen between artist Nick Tobier and Keith Love and Warren Thomas, local residents and patrons of the kitchen. Once a week, via a converted pickup truck, the market roams through Eastside neighborhoods that are underserved or unserved by grocery stores and that as a result have constrained access to fresh fruits and vegetables. Most of the market's produce is purchased from wholesale produce distributors using proceeds from previous sales; the market also sells produce from Earthworks' Youth Garden, which receives all proceeds from these sales.

Serving a series of locations adjacent to or within public housing or other public institutions, the market takes advantage of the unregulation of both commerce and public space in Detroit. Field of Our Dreams, however, is not only a market by default, filling a gap in Detroit's commercial infrastructure. It also suggests the availability of Detroit's sidewalks and street corners for any number of other interim uses, from social gathering to informal economies—all equally unreal from the perspective of the free market.

Where there is pain, there is an opportunity to provide therapy. Municipal therapists take on pain at the scale of the city, appropriating responsibility for urban repair from the authorities and institutions to which that responsibility has been delegated. In so doing, municipal therapy asserts a right to the city—a right that is often forgotten or even abandoned when urban life functions according to plan.

Municipal therapy reveals how the city opens precisely when it fails. While these failures are manifold in the city of unreal estate, so, too, are the therapies that these failures invoke. Damaged homes can be repaired, fallow land can be replanted, space can be provided for exchange, socializing, or remembrance of the forgotten; for any urban failure, or even missed urban opportunity, there is an opportunity for a therapeutic response.