Growing Detroit: A Case Study on Urban Farming and Political Ecology
By Nika Wong-Colley
In Detroit, the city with the highest poverty rate in the country (DePietro), there is an organization asking the question: How can we uplift a community through food? The Michigan Urban Farming Initiative (MUFI) is a three-acre farm that is changing the game of urban farming and breaking down barriers of land equity as it goes. In Detroit, food injustice is one of the many ways that a history of systemic racism, poverty, and land struggles has manifested. Detroit communities continue to struggle to establish urban farming organizations despite the abundance of abandoned land and the City of Detroit’s eagerness to give it away to wealthy, white investors. In the environmental sociology field, understanding the intricacies of these struggles through Detroit’s political and economic history is considered to be a part of political ecology. The political ecology lens allows us to better consider how MUFI is creating the blueprint for how urban farming can be used to create land and food resource sovereignty in urban communities of color.
In 1815, Detroit was incorporated as a city in the United States, but remained a rural merchant town until the early 1900s. Starting in 1914, Detroit developed into an industrial hub, where it became a leader in automobile and military supply production. Starting in the 1950’s, white residents began to move to the suburbs in search of the suburban dream away from city life and industry. Many Black communities did not possess the privilege to do the same, and were left in neighborhoods that had lost tax money and significant portions of their population. Detroit became a location of high racial tension in the 40s, 50s, and 60s as Black residents were subject to racial exclusion and police brutality. In the 1970s and onward, Detroit fell into economic depression as industry, and residents, continued to move away from the city. In the 2010s the city neighborhoods continued to fall into disrepair as the mayor shifted money away from distressed communities to try to attract newcomers to the more stable neighborhoods. This has left Detroit with crumbling or destroyed infrastructure and communities left in poverty (History of Detroit). As such, the majority Black communities who are left in the city face high poverty rates (Quickfacts: Detroit City, Michigan) and high food insecurity.
A key concern in Detroit is that of food deserts. According to the CDC, food deserts are “areas that lack access to affordable fruits, vegetables, whole grains, low-fat milk, and other foods that make up the full range of a healthy diet (“What is a food desert?”).” In recent years, many have been challenging Detroit’s status as a food desert, instead calling it a “food grassland” since only about 10% of Detroit can be classified as a food desert according to the USDA definition (Capital News Service). Another term that people use is “food apartheid.” As Amy Kuras of the Detroit Food Policy Action Council states, “‘There’s a reason that in Detroit, people often rely on things like party stores, convenience stores, for some of the food because there’s a lot of policy and planning and racism that leads to people perceiving Detroit as not a place to do business (Capital News Service).’” Despite food justice becoming a priority in many community led organizations, food access continues to be an issue because businesses don’t want to set up shop in these communities, and when they do, people don’t know how to find the healthful options. As Dorceta E. Taylor and Kerry J. Ard, environmental sociologists studying Detroit food systems, put it “we conclude that although it is erroneous to label the entire city of Detroit as a food desert, limited access to food, particularly nutritious food, is a fact of life for some Detroit residents.”
Detroit is a classic example of the injustice left in the decline of American industrial cities. As industry and residents leave, cities like Detroit are left with minimal resources, and often show a decline into the abandonment of physical and social infrastructure. With under half the city’s population as it had at its peak, many buildings and infrastructure have fallen into ruin in the last 50 years. The media has reframed Detroit as a beautiful yet tragic portrayal of a post-industrial city. People tour the “ruins” of Detroit, or marvel over photographs of the crumbling buildings. Some call it “ruin porn” (Hazelett). This portrayal of Detroit in desolation allows for a narrative to form of Detroit neighborhoods left empty and ready for redevelopment (Shulte). On the contrary, while these abandoned buildings and infrastructure are prevalent, many still live, work, and play in these neighborhoods.
In 2013, the City of Detroit released a 50-year plan stating their hopes to convert a lot of its highest vacancy neighborhoods into green and blue infrastructure, like retention ponds, carbon forests, and urban farms (Safransky). This plan takes the media’s interpretation of these neighborhoods being abandoned and desolate, and seeks to find a way to “rewild” the land. As Sara Safransky, a political ecologist who works primarily in Detroit, points out, this settler colonialism ideology can be compared to instances throughout history where the idea of a “new frontier” erases the existing relationships that people of color have to the land. About 90,000 people would be displaced by the repurposing of these neighborhoods (Safransky). While green spaces are often seen as positive additions to neighborhoods in urban environments, the mass repurposing of land shown in Detroit follows a trend of modern colonialism and displacement of communities of color.
An example of the inequity of the green redevelopment process is discussed by Safransky using the case study of Hantz Woodlands. Despite the community raising major concerns of food justice and equity of land ownership, the city government sold 180 acres in a Detroit “no market value” area to John Hantz in 2012. Hantz is a white, 48-year-old, white financier who owns a multi-billion dollar planning and investment firm in the suburbs of Detroit. Hantz’s intention with the land is to help create scarcity in the real estate market and to grow hardwood trees for logging, in that order. Hantz has been transparent with his goals to get public foreclosed land into “responsible private hands,” a tactic that Safransky describes as a colonial ideology of dispossession. According to Safransky, “if he follows the agreement, in 2016, he will be given the right of first refusal to buy all city-owned lots in a one-mile radius around the site. Hantz could potentially own one fourteenth of Detroit. Nothing in the development agreement binds Hantz to forestry or agriculture after the initial 4 years.” Detroit is allowing rich white individuals to have exorbitant power over land acquisition, displacing communities of color and ignoring their relationships to the land.
The backlash that Hantz received before receiving the land sale was mostly from locals who argue that the choice of land sale and permitting is highly inequitable. Safransky writes, “For example, Edith Floyd, who has been farming for 40 years near Hantz Woodlands but has had trouble getting even a temporary permit for her greenhouse, argued that the city should sell land to people who have been caring for it.” There are many individuals and communities that steward land in Detroit, and still cannot get rights to land that the government qualifies as “empty” and of “no market value.” According to Paul Robbins, a political ecologist, the first tenant of political ecology is environmental conflict and exclusion, the idea that “environmental conflicts are shown to be part of larger gendered, classed, and race struggles and vice versa.” The issue in Detroit is not with urban agriculture or greening, it is an issue of community choice and equity.
In contrast to Hantz Woodlands, Detroit is also home to many community run urban farms and food justice initiatives that are working to uplift communities from the inside. Despite the many challenges that these organizations face in getting established and staying in operation, when they do, they provide an invaluable service to the community. Through organizations like MUFI, communities have access to healthy food, nature, and the ability to control the state of their neighborhoods and their food access. Relocalization of food systems allows people to have more control over food access and more power to address food insecurity and food deserts. In addition, urban farms provide opportunities to interact intimately with the land and the ability to make informed decisions about their food consumption. These practices create opportunities for communities to heal through interactions with nature and each other. Local food also decreases emissions, food waste, urban heat island effect, and runoff, and increases urban biodiversity. Ultimately, the relocalization of food is about people, land, climate, sovereignty, and justice.
An organization called the Michigan Urban Farming Initiative is trying to create an unprecedented urban agrihood in Detroit’s North End Neighborhood. The term “agrihood,” first coined in 2014 by a California developer, is used to describe a neighborhood in which agriculture is integrated into an residential neighborhood (Adams). At its center, agrihoods allow for communities to produce and consume their own food, which allows people to better interact with the land and feed themselves more healthfully and sustainably. That being said, most agrihoods are new developments which are planned explicitly to incorporate community gardening initiatives into the core values of the community. MUFI is also providing a service that the community would not have otherwise. Detroit’s food insecurity has forced communities to remedy their own food access issues. According to Taylor and Ard, “there are more urban farming, community and school gardening, and farmers’ market venues in Detroit than there are supermarkets.”
MUFI is the first endeavor to transition a major urban neighborhood into an agrihood. According to MUFI, their mission is to “empower urban communities, solve many social problems facing Detroit, and potentially develop a broader model for redevelopment for other urban communities.” The food grown on this 3-acre plot contributes fresh food to local families, markets, restaurants, and food pantries. The land is dedicated to production farming along with interactive community gardening spaces (Michigan Urban Farming Initiative). This allows for the community to interact with the land and the food from seed to table.
Through the lens of political ecology, we can begin to understand how MUFI’s urban agrihood model completely rewrites the way that we think about cities and agricultural access. Political ecology is the study of ecology contextualized in political and economic factors. This allows political ecologists to better understand how ecology is impacted by politics, and how politics are impacted by ecology. According to Robbins, this is in contrast to the conventional study of apolitical ecology in which ecology is studied without the contextualization of socio-political factors. Within all definitions of political ecology, a key premise is the idea that environmental change and conditions are a product of political processes and vice versa.
In his paper about first world political ecology, James McCarthy says that political ecology has no single definition, but contains most or all of the following major themes:
“access to and control over resources; marginality; integration of scales of analysis; the effects of integration into international markets; the centrality of livelihood issues; ambiguities in property rights and the importance of informal claims to resource use and access; the importance of local histories, meanings, culture, and `micropolitics’ in resource use; the disenfranchisement of legitimate local users and uses; the effects of limited state capacity; and the imbrications of all these with colonial and postcolonial legacies and dynamic.”
With the exception of international markets, these frameworks are extremely relevant to the Detroit food system, and can help to contextualize MUFI’s work into the history, resource disputes, and marginalities of the food system.
As Safransky points out, the prominent ideology that exists within Detroit policy is that of deserted land waiting to be put into production or “rewilded.” It is an idea that is common throughout eurocentric societies that humans can either control land or be separate from it. Instead, programs like MUFI create community sovereignty to steward land and should act as a reminder that community and the environment are inherently intertwined rather than mutually exclusive. MUFI considers themselves to be an organization committed to the “adaptive reuse of the built environment” (The Michigan Urban Farming Initiative).
To best understand the political barriers to urban farming, it is helpful to compare MUFI’s work to that of the developers of Harvest Green, Texas. Harvest Green is a recently developed agrihood that operates on similar ideas that a community built around sustainable and accessible food is happier and healthier (Harvest Green). However, the path to developing such a community was much different. The Harvest Green community has been built on retired farmland in which they have been able to plan a community specifically around agrihood goals. The site is able to reside on relatively uncontested farmland outside of the urban environment, where there is less land conflict, because everyone in the neighborhood is wealthy enough to own a car. In addition, the Harvest Green properties are targeted towards white homeowners, whom as we have seen from the Hantz Woodlands example, are more often accepted as legitimate occupants of available property. Houses in Harvest Green sell for 400,000 to 900,000 dollars for a house in Harvest Green with $1,200 in annual dues (Harvest Green). Ultimately, Harvest Green properties are built with the privileges of wealth and the ability to build a community from scratch with an agrihood plan.
The Harvest Green story is in obvious contrast to the barriers that the MUFI community has faced. Firstly, MUFI operates on partnerships and crowd-sourced funding. In addition, MUFI is 100% volunteer run by the community. This means that community members, many of whom are struggling to make ends meet, come together to work to build this community resource. Unlike Harvest Green, who’s Homeowners Association hires people to run the farm and other amenities, running the MUFI agrihood is hard work that the community does themselves. In addition they have managed to secure rights to land in a system that clearly has worked against them. Whereas Harvest Green was easily able to purchase abandoned farmland, people of color in Detroit have been shown time and time again that they are not a priority in obtaining land rights. MUFI continues to prove that the most effective way to repurpose land in a way that best serves Detroit is to give communities the power and resources to do it in their vision.
Despite these barriers, MUFI has been able to effectively run 2 acres of agricultural land in Detroit and directly benefit the surrounding community. According to the MUFI website, they “believe that challenges unique to urban communities like Detroit (e.g., vacant land, food security) present a unique opportunity for community-supported agriculture.” While MUFI recognizes that there are large challenges that urban communities face in establishing community-based agriculture, they provide a safe space for people to take back control of land and participate in radical acts of self-sufficiency.
According to Tyson Gersh, co-founder of MUFI, MUFI has“‘helped sustain the neighborhood, attracted new residents and area investment’” (Adams). Whereas “agrihoods often focus on appealing to home buyers” (Dellinger), MUFI has been able to create a system that depends on the work of community volunteers who truly care about the values of the organization, and are thus best equipped to serve the existing community. While the creation of flourishing urban green spaces does bring up the concern of gentrification, many Detroit urban farms, including MUFI, maintain the uplifting of local Black communities at the center of their mission (Adams).
MUFI shows that we can efficiently house people within cities without losing a relationship with the land and the food that sustains us. While MUFI has much farther to grow, they have set an example for Detroit and beyond. MUFI provides an active experiment in political ecology which considers how community-based land repurposing and urban agriculture can support communities that have experienced decades of systemic inequity. While programs like MUFI can not address every issue of political ecology in Detroit, it provides a blueprint for how to leverage urban farming initiatives to put control back into the hands of communities while providing important access to food and ecosystem services. This case study is a hopeful example of how urban agriculture can be a vehicle to rebuild urban environments and address structural inequity in marginalized neighborhoods.
Works Cited
Adams, Biba. “In Detroit, A New Type of Agricultural Neighborhood Has Emerged.” YES!, 5 Nov. 2019.
Capital News Service. “Detroit’s Status as ‘food Desert’ Challenged as More Produce Options Emerge.” Spartan Newsroom, 21 Jan. 2022, news.jrn.msu.edu/2022/01/detroits-status-as-food-desert-challenged-as-more-produce-options-emerge/.
Dellinger, AJ. “Agrihoods Imagine a Future Organized around Community Agriculture.” Mic, 22 Apr. 2022, www.mic.com/impact/agrihoods-urban-farming-sustainable-food.
DePietro, Andrew. “U.S. Poverty Rate By City In 2021.” Forbes, 26 Nov. 2021, www.forbes.com/sites/andrewdepietro/2021/11/26/us-poverty-rate-by-city-in-2021/?sh=5539ab515a54.
“Harvest Green.” Www.Harvestgreentexas.Com, www.harvestgreentexas.com/. Accessed 21 Mar. 2023.
Hazelett, : Evan. “Detroit: Decay, Displacement, and Exploitation.” HARVARD URBAN REVIEW, 30 June 2021, harvardurbanreview.org/detroit-decay-displacement-exploitation/.
“History of Detroit.” Encyclopædia Britannica, www.britannica.com/place/Detroit/History. Accessed 21 Mar. 2023.
McCarthy, James. “First World Political Ecology: Lessons from the Wise Use Movement.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, vol. 34, no. 7, 29 Jan. 2002, pp. 1281–1302, https://doi.org/10.1068/a3526.
Michigan Urban Farming Initiative, www.miufi.org/. Accessed 21 Mar. 2023.
“Quickfacts: Detroit City, Michigan.” United States Census Bureau, www.census.gov/quickfacts/detroitcitymichigan. Accessed 21 Mar. 2023.
Robbins, Paul. Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction. Wiley-Blackwell, 2020.
Safransky, Sara. “Greening the Urban Frontier: Race, Property, and Resettlement in Detroit.” Geoforum, vol. 56, Sept. 2014, pp. 237–248, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2014.06.003.
Taylor, Dorceta E, and Kerry J Ard. Detroit’s Food Justice and Food Systems, spring 2015.
“What Is a Food Desert? Causes, Statistics, & Resources.” Ohio University, 9 Nov. 2021, onlinemasters.ohio.edu/food-deserts-definition/.
