Greening the Black Urban Regime

The Culture and Commerce of Sustainability in Detroit

Alesia Montgomery

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780814346525
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Social Sciences

Describes the struggle to shape green redevelopment in Detroit.

Alesia Montgomery's Greening the Black Urban Regime: The Culture and Commerce of Sustainability in Detroit tells the story of the struggle to shape green redevelopment in Detroit. Cultural workers, envisioning a green city crafted by direct democracy, had begun to draw idealistic young newcomers to Detroit's street art and gardens. Then a billionaire developer and private foundations hired international consultants to redesign downtown and to devise a city plan. Using the justice-speak of cultural workers, these consultants did innovative outreach, but they did not enable democratic deliberation. The Detroit Future City plan won awards, and the new green venues in the gentrified downtown have gotten good press. However, low-income black Detroiters have little ability to shape "greening" as uneven development unfolds and poverty persists.

Based on years of fieldwork, Montgomery takes us into the city council chambers, nonprofit offices, gardens, churches, cafés, street parties, and public protests where the future of Detroit was imagined, debated, and dictated. She begins by using statistical data and oral histories to trace the impacts of capital flight, and then she draws on interviews and observations to show how these impacts influence city planning. Hostility between blacks and whites shape the main narrative, yet indigenous, Asian, Arab, and Latinx peoples in Detroit add to the conflict. Montgomery compares Detroit to other historical black urban regimes (HBURs)—U.S. cities that elected their first black mayors soon after the 1960s civil rights movement. Critiques of ecological urbanism in HBURs typically focus on gentrification. In contrast, Montgomery identifies the danger as minoritization: the imposition of "beneficent" governance across gentrified and non-gentrified neighborhoods that treats the black urban poor as children of nature who lack the (mental, material) capacities to decide their future. Scholars and students in the social sciences, as well as general readers with social and environmental justice concerns, will find great value in this research.

Index

Page numbers in italics refer to images.

Abahlali baseMjondolo, 180

accountability: of city-redesign experts, 213–14, 220–21; types of community, 223; of urban design field, 228

ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan), 125

Adamah, 44, 192, 193

AECOM, 213, 214

African Americans: black joy, 81–82, 84, 88–89, 155; black militancy, 79; black power movement, 221; black press, 70; black radicalism, 31–32; black rural farms, 88–89, 159; black urban farmers, 164; black urban stores, 88–89, 133–35; concern of, for environmental justice, 24, 229–30; in Detroit neighborhoods, 155; expelled from Springfield, 233–34; incarceration of, 70; income gap among, 12–13; job discrimination against, 12; listening to, 52; and revitalization of downtown, 116–19; as supporters of Detroit’s new regime, 22; upward trajectory of, 53–54; and urban greening, 157. See also historical black urban regimes (HBURs); race

African diaspora, 8, 18, 20, 48–49, 163–64, 175–76, 221

Afro-Futurism, 139

Agenda 21 (1992), 33

agricultural tour, 167–68

Agyeman, Julian, 35, 231

Akers, Joshua, 157

Alcock, Heidi, 187, 191, 203

Allen, Will, 161–62, 164

Allied Media Conference (AMC), 167–68

Alston, Dana, 34–35

Anaheim plan, 236, 239–40

Anderson, Elijah, 71, 152

Anderson, Hamilton, 203

Anderson, Kent, 117

And Still We Rise exhibit, 176

Anishinaabe, 46–47, 48, 85

Anthony, Carl, 20

Anthropocene, 27–28

Arab ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• I. Empire and the Garden
• II. Paradise Lost
• III. Redemption
• IV. The Forum
• V. Consilium Principis
• VI. Naming the Baby
• Appendix: Methods
• Notes
• Index