Motor City Green

A Century of Landscapes and Environmentalism in Detroit

Joseph S. Cialdella

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780822987024
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Social Sciences

Winner, 2021 CCL J. B. Jackson Book Prize | Winner, 2020 Jon Gjerde Prize from the Midwestern History Association

Motor City Green is a history of green spaces in metropolitan Detroit from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. The book focuses primarily on the history of gardens and parks in the city of Detroit and its suburbs in southeast Michigan. Cialdella argues that Detroit residents used green space to address problems created by the city's industrial rise and decline, and racial segregation and economic inequality. As the city's social landscape became increasingly uncontrollable, Detroiters turned to parks, gardens, yards, and other outdoor spaces to relieve the negative social and environmental consequences of industrial capitalism. Motor City Green looks to the past to demonstrate how today's urban gardens in Detroit evolved from, but are also distinct from, other urban gardens and green spaces in the city's past.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION: GREENING DETROIT’S HISTORY

1. Andrew Moore, Detroit Disassembled, 122, 119.

2. For critiques and deeper analysis of “ruin porn” imagery of Detroit and other cities, see Dora Apel, Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015), esp. ch. 4; Rebecca Kinney, Beautiful Wasteland: The Rise of Detroit as America’s Postindustrial Frontier (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); Sara Safransky, “Greening the Urban Frontier: Race, Property, and Resettlement in Detroit,” Geoforum 56 (2014): 237–48; George Steinmetz, “Harrowed Landscapes: White Ruingazers in Namibia and Detroit and the Cultivation of Memory,” Visual Studies 23, no. 3 (December 2008).

3. John Gallagher, “Wide Open Detroit,” Detroit Free Press, April 1, 2012.

4. Betsy Stevens. “Detroit Urban Farm and Garden Tour,” You Tube, 2007, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzX-XKw2D04&feature=channel_page/. For more on Peacemakers garden, see Andy McGlashen, “Urban Pioneers Turn Vacant Lots Verdant,” Great Lakes Echo, September 8, 2009, https://greatlakesecho.org/2009/09/08/urban-pioneers-turn-vacant-lots-verdant/.

5. Paul Harris, “Detroit Gets Growing,” Guardian, July 10, 2010, http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jul/11/detroit-urban-renewal-city-farms-paul-harris/.

6. Moore, Detroit Disassembled, 119; Solnit, “Detroit Arcadia.”

7. Helphand, Defiant Gardens, 9.

8. Scholars important to the field of American Studies have long been concerned with the idea of place and landscapes in American culture, although their works often lacked a focus on the diversity of actors and ideas outside of Anglo-American culture. For example, see Marx, Machine in the Garden. Marx’s work, in particular, uses the idea of the “machine in the garden”—technology intruding upon an idealized landscape—to examine Americans’ literary fascination with the pastoral “middle landscapes” in the context of industrial transformation brought about by technology. The way Americans imagined the land as an idealized “landscape of reconciliation” that balanced nature and culture in a harmonious way, Marx argues, was in stark contradiction to the way industrialization was changing the land. Additionally, see Peter J. Schmitt, Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969); Annette Kolondy, The Land before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967).

9. “Weeds Are Thriving on City’s Vacant Lots,” Detroit Free Press, July 11, 1908. Battles against weeds, a central feature of the urban landscape, have shaped environmental and urban change across metropolitan America, as historian Zachary Falck argues. Gardeners and civic leaders in Detroit also reacted in response to happenstance plants, which to them often represented abandonment, neglect, and lack of economic value. See Falck, Weeds.

10. Dudley Randall, “Vacant Lot,” in Roses and Revolutions: The Selected Writings of Dudley Randall, ed. Melba Joyce Boyd (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009), 48.

11. In his work titled Concrete and Clay, Matthew Gandy advances the concept of “rustbelt ecology” to describe environmental justice activism in the Bronx. Here, the term is helpful for drawing attention to the connections between nature and industry and material practices that create shared, if competing stories about the cultural landscape in cities such as Detroit.

12. Matthew Klingle, in Emerald City, for example, looks at Seattle over a long period of time to examine how reworking nature had perpetuated inequalities. Some scholars have focused on writing histories of familiar places from an environmental perspective. They look more at the cultural and social dimensions of nature in the city, particularly around public space. For example, see Kelman, A River and Its City; David Scobey, Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002); Rawson, Eden on the Charles; Catherine McNeur, Taming Manhattan; Ellen Stroud, Nature Next Door: Cities and Trees in the American Northeast (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012); Falck, Weeds; Gandy, Concrete and Clay. For a comprehensive study looking at inequality and environment in American cities, see Dorceta E. Taylor, The Environment and the People in American Cities: Disorder, Inequality, and Social Change, 1600s–1900s (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).

13. Urban environmental history has grown into a well-developed subfield. William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton 1992) was among the first environmental histories of a major city. He takes a bird’s-eye view of the city and focuses primarily on how both the city and its hinterland were transformed by industrial development as natural resources were brought to the city. Stradling, in Making Mountains, looked at the relationship between the city and outlying regions, this time through the lens of tourism. Reflecting recent trends in the field to look at power relations and structures more intensely, Andrew Needham, in Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), has examined more closely how the cultural and social relationships between cities and nature drive imperial nations. Even before these works, Anne Spirn, in The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design (New York: Basic Books, 1985), emphasized the role of nature in an urban environment. For a study of how cities form a foundation of American environmental thought, see Shen Hou, The City Natural. Other historians have taken the field of urban environmental history in new directions by investigating sensory aspects of the environment. See Melanie Kiechle, Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth Century Urban America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017).

14. For other recent studies on Detroit’s environmental history, see Cooper-McCann, “The Promise of Parkland”; Rector, “Accumulating Risk”; Ward, “Detroit Wild.” For a chapter on connections between the United Automobile Workers and the environmental movement in Detroit, see Chad Montrie, Making a Living: Work and Environment in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 91–112. For a historical and sociological study of African Americans’ connections to agriculture nationally and in Detroit, see White, Freedom Farmers.

15. Wilderness has historically played an important if overbearing role in American environmentalism. Environmental historians and particularly some recent urban environmental scholarship have challenged wilderness as the dominant environmental framework. For example, see Fisher, Urban Green, especially the introduction. On challenging the idea of wilderness as an organizing framework more broadly, see William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995).

16. For a comprehensive study of the multiple factors that led to Detroit’s decline, see Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis. For an analysis of urban planning and race, see Thomas, Redevelopment and Race. On postwar politics, see Heather Ann Thompson, Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). For a study of the first half of the twentieth century, see Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality. The historian Tiya Miles has recently reexamined Detroit’s early years with an eye toward the city’s colonial era populations of indigenous Anishinaabe peoples, enslaved and free African Americans, and Anglo and French settlers. See Miles, The Dawn of Detroit. On the Great Migration, African American women, and cultural politics in Detroit, see Wolcott, Remaking Respectability.

17. Scholars of vernacular architecture and cultural landscapes have studied and theorized the connections between landscapes and culture. As Dell Upton defines it, the cultural landscape ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Greening Detroit’s History
• One. Parks and Potatoes
• Two. “You Cannot Grow Lilies in Ash-Barrels”
• Three. Greener Pastures
• Four. Metropolitan Parks and Regional Inequality
• Five. Community Gardening and Urban Revitalization
• Epilogue. Learning with Detroit
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index