Across Detroit, land is being turned over to agriculture. Furrows are being tilled, soil fertilised and crops planted and harvested. Like in no other city in the world, urban farming has taken root in Detroit, not just as a hobby or a sideline but as part of a model for a wholesale revitalisation of a major city. Some farms are the product of hardy individualists or non-profit community groups. Others, like Hantz Farms, are backed by millions of dollars and aim to build the world's biggest urban farm right in the middle of the city.
Mark Covington, 38, is one of those 21st-century pioneers, though he stumbled on his role almost by accident. Finding himself unemployed after losing his job as an environmental engineer and living back with his mother two years ago, he started tidying up an empty lot near his Georgia Street home, planting vegetables and allowing local people to harvest them for free. An orchard of fruit trees followed, as did a community centre – made by converting a pair of empty buildings – which keeps local youths off the streets. The result is a transformation of the area around his childhood home. Local kids come to movie nights held amid the crops. Residents love the free, fresh food in an area where no major supermarkets exist. The Georgia Street Community Garden is never vandalised.
Standing next to a freshly planted bed of onions, potatoes, garlic and collard greens, Covington is a genial soul with gentleness built into a giant physical frame that could play American football. As he walks his neighbourhood, it seems everyone knows his name and calls out hello. He seems unsure of whether or not he is at the forefront of a social revolution, but he does know that he has made a big difference to a part of the city where real improvements have been in short supply. "I just did what seemed like needed to be done," he shrugs.
A familiar refrain from many of the thousands of people involved in urban farming in Detroit is that they are returning the city to its pre-industrial roots. Back in the late 18th century, Detroit was a small trading post surrounded by fields and farms. "You know, this area began as farmland and we are just going back to that," says Rich Wieske, who runs more than 60 beehives in inner-city Detroit and sells the resulting honey commercially. The middle-aged Wieske sports a white beard and a passion for his bees. What began as a hobby to provide honey for making mead has now turned into a profession.
As he tends five of his hives, situated on a plot of land that used to house a grand brick mansion, but is now a pleasant patch of woodland, Wieske marvels at how suitable the environment of the inner city is for his tiny charges. Each year Wieske's apiary, Green Toe Gardens, produces about 3,000lb of honey and sells it in local Detroit markets. "Our harvests are as high as anywhere else in the US. There is so much forage, so much land for the bees," he says.
Yet the fact remains that for the past 100 years Detroit was all about industry. It was where Henry Ford invented the production line, giving birth to the car industry. Detroit became the archetypal American 20th- century metropolis on the back of hundreds of huge factories, surrounded by solid middle-class houses and a thriving downtown filled with skyscrapers. It was a magnet for immigrant workers and produced vast industrial fortunes for grand American families, becoming a centre of culture and manufacturing where politicians could dream of one day rivalling New York.
No more. The car industry faded, taking jobs with it. "White flight" saw neighbourhoods decay as the middle classes departed, ruining any chance of raising enough taxes for the city's upkeep. A once-wealthy, ethnically mixed city is now more than 80% black, with an unemployment rate believed to be as high as 50%. Since the 1970s there have been numerous efforts to stem the decline, either by trying to stop the car factories from leaving or by bringing in new industries, such as the massive casinos that have sprung up downtown.
All have failed. Detroit is not being transformed by some massive top-down initiative, but by projects like the urban farm that has emerged on Linwood Street. It's a typical Detroit scene, with burnt-out shops, empty lots and houses, plus a few other buildings where residents are barely clinging on. It is busy with the roar of traffic, as well as the sound of a small John Deere tractor which is mowing the grass around a large plot of bare earth that has been prepared for planting. There are more bare fields on nearby lots. The smell of damp earth and fertiliser mingles with exhaust fumes. The Linwood Street urban farm is now in its fourth planting season, producing a bounty of corn, squash and potatoes for local residents to harvest, again for free. Developed by Urban Farming, which was founded by Detroit singer and former Prince protégé Taja Sevelle, the movement is dedicated to turning vacant land over to food production, providing a healthier diet to city people who either go hungry or have poor nutrition.
Some of Urban Farming's projects, such as Linwood, are huge, spanning several city blocks and generating substantial amounts of food. Others, like planting single gardens on rooftops or creating "living walls", are small. Last year alone the group oversaw the creation of 900 food gardens in Detroit. Some were in people's gardens, others on land donated to charities by local people or bought from the city.
Sevelle sees what is happening as a harbinger of urban development for the western world's declining inner cities, with Detroit at the cutting edge of the phenomenon. "I see the entire world looking different. Detroit will be number one in showing people how to pull a city out of a situation like this," she says.
If there is no more manufacturing with $70 an hour wages - if the jobs have gone to Asia - then "There are no more jobs!"
At rock bottom, Detroit is I think showing us part of the future. A new local, local owned, small scale, highly networked, high out put, high employment food system.
