Defining Detroit: What to Make of America's Most Interesting City, Part 1
By Sid Rothstein, published March 7, 2011

When I told people I was going to Detroit, I generally got two responses. Sometimes I got a sardonic smile and the person would ask, “Why?” For them, Detroit was that god-forsaken city, the capital of America’s racial unrest, unliving testimony to the failure of industrial capitalism. The other set, usually younger, excitedly made me promise to tell them how it went, holding my gaze with widened eyes. Was what they heard true?

Detroit has been in the news a lot recently. After the riots – or the Rebellion, depending on who you talk to – the media has had few stories to tell about the city beyond decay, corruption, and failure. Now the tables have turned, and it’s hard to find descriptions of Detroit that don’t laud the incredible opportunities there. Who isn’t invigorated by the prospect of buying a house for $10,000? The New York Times gushes about the proliferation of small, locally-owned businesses in Detroit, epitomized by Slows Bar B.Q. Oprah inspires housewives with stories of the city’s urban gardeners. Radicals talk about the prospects for organizing autonomous communities given the availability of cheap land and the lack of regulation.

In San Francisco, Berkeley, Portland, even DC, I heard stories of buying plots of city land for $200, or for nothing, where you’d grow more vegetables than you and all your friends could ever eat. Knee-high kale, elbow-deep beets, block-long patches of strawberries. You’d fall in love on the beautiful hardwood floors of abandoned mansions. With the surplus of land and vegetables, you’d reach out to the community to work on food security and provide a space for building community in that post-industrial woodcut of Detroit somebody has already made. Beans climbing up rusty I-beams, fruit trees shading burned bricks. We’d watched this happen in Portland, but this was Detroit. In a city where the black majority took up arms in the fight against the white-dominated power structure, you’d be working with the black community, being responsible about your role and being intentional about “dismantling racism.” Detroit sounded a like a dream, a place where urban agriculture provided a way to organize against both class-based and racial oppression. And you could do it in style; we joked to each other, “Let’s move to Detroit and buy a castle!”