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Mpow
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Username: Mpow

Post Number: 256
Registered: 11-2003
Posted on Monday, June 18, 2007 - 12:13 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Anyone have a subscription to read it? Or is this article posted anywhere?

http://www.harpers.org/archive /2007/07/0081594
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Vas
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Username: Vas

Post Number: 735
Registered: 01-2004
Posted on Monday, June 18, 2007 - 1:01 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Get a subscription. Its the best Magazine out there. I need to read this.
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Lowell
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Username: Lowell

Post Number: 3898
Registered: 10-2003
Posted on Monday, June 18, 2007 - 1:02 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

I subscribe and read it just last night. They might post it after the issue is dated. So here is my review:

It had a gawker tone with the eye firmly fixed on the on the urban prairie / abandonment ruin side, with the familiar grim 'ain't if awful' intonements. Yet another visitor stares into the abyss of Detroit's situation and is overmatched by what is revealed.

Some of it is factually incorrect.

Most glaring was this, "Its [Detroit] as if the fort had been turned inside out -- and, in fact, in the 1940's a six-foot wall was built along Eight Mile Road, which traces Detroit's northern limits, to contain the growing African-American population."

Of course we all know that the wall runs perpendicular to 8 Mile, not along it. Of course the fact that African-Americans had inhabited that area, both sides of Eight Mile, long before the city sprawl swept over the area is totally missed.

Likewise a venture in the Dequindre cut is described as, "Lush greenery grew along tracks and up , which were like a museum of spray-can art from the 1980s and 1990s." Obviously she should have noticed by the paint quality that these have been painted over many time since then.

Other parts are exaggerated. Like many not truly familiar with Detroit, there is an overly eager effort to paint much of the CofD as a place where nature is returning and new prairie residents are returning to farming. "...a pair of wild pheasants, bursting from a lush row of vegetables and flying over a cyclone fence toward a burned-out building.." It is a warm bucolic vision that the writing gets bent to accomodate.

"Everywhere I went, I saw the rich soil of Detroit and the hard work of the garderners bring forth an abundant harvest any organic farmer would envy."

Come on now, I drive all over the city week after week for years and I can count the number of these urban farms on one hand.

I did like this observation, "The forces that produced Detroit -- the combination of bitter racism and single-industry failure -- are anomalous, but the general recipe of deindustrialization, depopulation, and resource depletion will likely touch almost all the regions of the global north in the next century or two. Dresden was rebuilt, and so was Hiroshima, and so were the cities destroyed by natural forces -- San Francisco and Mexico City and Tanshan -- but Detroit will never be rebuilt as it was. It will be the first of many cities forced to become altogether something else."

We are at a great moment in history of this metropolis. The cards have been tossed in the air and we have the great and frightening opportunity to define the future. That makes us, for better or worse, a very cutting edge city.

Quotes for "Detroit Arcadia" Exploring the post-American landscape by Rebecca Solnit. Harpers July 2007
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Charlottepaul
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Username: Charlottepaul

Post Number: 1146
Registered: 10-2006
Posted on Monday, June 18, 2007 - 7:53 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

At least it ends with that optimistic quote, otherwise, did you learn anything new from it? I guess it was obviously written more for those outside Detroit. Hopefully that group of people didn't get a story proving the image of Detroit in their head true.
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Mpow
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Username: Mpow

Post Number: 257
Registered: 11-2003
Posted on Monday, June 18, 2007 - 11:10 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Thanks Lowell
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Lilpup
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Username: Lilpup

Post Number: 2332
Registered: 06-2004
Posted on Monday, June 18, 2007 - 11:35 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

post-American?
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Professorscott
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Username: Professorscott

Post Number: 451
Registered: 12-2006
Posted on Tuesday, June 19, 2007 - 12:14 am:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Lowell,

This is a great board in general; and how do you pronounce your last name?

Back to the topic: I agree with your valedictory exhortation about our "great and frightening opportunity", which is well put. The question is will we take advantage of the opportunity?

What I have seen of the people in and around Detroit tilts me toward optimism, but what I have seen of our governments tilts me quite the other way.

The reference to a partly real and partly imagined return to farmland amused me. I remember when in the 1980s Sarah and I were staying with my mom in upstate New York over Thanksgiving, the local paper had a feature article headlined "Once Great Detroit Now Vast Wasteland". It described, among other things, tumbleweeds blowing down Guoin Street and pheasants crossing roads.

People believe about us what they like to believe, and the media feed that just like everything else. It's the same phenomenon that created the television program "Cops" and similar shows: my life may be imperfect and my family dysfunctional, but at least I'm not one of them. Tee hee! It's fun being the them in a way.
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Lowell
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Username: Lowell

Post Number: 3903
Registered: 10-2003
Posted on Tuesday, June 19, 2007 - 12:28 am:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Bwah-low... just like it is spelled. :-)
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Professorscott
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Username: Professorscott

Post Number: 453
Registered: 12-2006
Posted on Tuesday, June 19, 2007 - 12:35 am:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Yes, French is just so-o-o phonetic.

My family's original last name is French; we were Acadians, as they used to call it. "Henrichon", which as far as I can tell is pronounced like "on-REE-show". My great-grandfather anglicized it partly because he was tired of people butchering it.
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Pam
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Username: Pam

Post Number: 1895
Registered: 11-2005
Posted on Tuesday, June 19, 2007 - 7:00 am:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

quote:

Some of it is factually incorrect.



Lowell did you contact them and point out the errors? Sad, that they couldn't spend some time to fact check the story.
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Professorscott
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Username: Professorscott

Post Number: 455
Registered: 12-2006
Posted on Tuesday, June 19, 2007 - 12:05 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

"Fact check"? What does that phrase mean? I think that is one of those old phrases newspaperpeople used to use.
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Charlottepaul
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Username: Charlottepaul

Post Number: 1152
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Posted on Tuesday, June 19, 2007 - 12:10 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

"What I have seen of the people in and around Detroit tilts me toward optimism, but what I have seen of our governments tilts me quite the other way."

Well if you want something done, you better do it yourself and not wait on the government. So it is probably a good thing that the optimism you see is coming from people and not the government!
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Lafayette
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Username: Lafayette

Post Number: 17
Registered: 03-2007
Posted on Tuesday, June 19, 2007 - 1:21 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

When the issue arrived in the mail and I knew there was an article in there about Detroit, I braced myself to read the old cliches about a dying city that "still burns to the ground" every Devil's Night, and isn't it sad there are so many abandoned buildings, blah blah blah....all the typical reactions you get from someone who doesn't know about the city and isn't from this area, with all the typical things they focus on when they drive around and look at the city.

What I did find was somewhat annoying, but for different reasons. I, like Lowell, honed in on the writer's comment about other industrial cities preparing to get "Detroit-ed" in the 21st century, which I wholly agree with for the reason the writer eloquently describes. But I, like Lowell, was irritated with the writer's (or editor's) obvious desire to inflate the impact urban gardens are having on the city's renaissance. I don't in any way diminish or disparage the urban gardens and their movement; their vision is critical to the hope of Detroit's future. But urban gardens have not been the foundation of the city's transformation of its self-image to the extent that the city has been economically redefined by urban gardens and their offshoots (pun intended) in an economically sustainable way, which is the vision the writer has for this movement. So, the writer misplaced the actual impact urban gardens are having on the city.

I thought the writer captured the eerie feeling of some blighted, abandoned neighborhoods with vivid descriptions of the visual impact of well-kept houses, next to not-so-well-kept houses, next to lots reclaimed by Mother Nature.

She did ignore a lot about the city, mainly what's good by glossing over it or casually mentioning it at best. It's hard to say what her and her editor's intention was with the assignment in the first place, but I read it as a piece that focuses on the strangeness of select areas of Detroit blight juxtaposed with what she saw as the beginning of the city's reformation through the urban garden movement, with the overarching theme as a warning to other former-industrial powerhouse cities to heed the lessons of Detroit and see what she's doing via the urban garden movement to overcome it, despite its at times ugly history of racism, wasteful land use policies, etc.
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Tom48236
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Username: Tom48236

Post Number: 5
Registered: 01-2004
Posted on Monday, June 25, 2007 - 12:07 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Search : Ze'ev Chafets article
"Tragedy of Detroit"
July 29 1990 New York Times sunday magazine
and possibly post it here
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Lafayette
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Username: Lafayette

Post Number: 18
Registered: 03-2007
Posted on Monday, June 25, 2007 - 12:56 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

It can't be mentioned too often that for one of the most definitive reads on how Detroit became what it is today, ya gotta read Thomas Sugrue's book "The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit." All of Rebecca's musings and wonderings in her Harper's article would be answered if she read that book.
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Vas
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Username: Vas

Post Number: 744
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Posted on Monday, June 25, 2007 - 1:12 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

I found the article pushing the idea of urban gardening and then picking Detroit as its main example. Rather than vice versa.
As Lowell pointed out urban farming isn't as popular and widespread as she mentioned.
I did not like how she typified every white person from the area as a suburbanite that blamed the downfall of the city on blacks. She seemed to further divisions by acting as if the greening of Detroit is only being created by black Detroiters.

She also refrained from getting into the hornets nest of talking about Diego Rivera and his communist vision of machinery and auto production taking the poor out of the fields and into good, abundant middle class labor.
To do that would have put an intersting spin on things. Why Diego would consider the DIA mural as one of his strongest works, and do it for one of the biggest capitlaists of the time, whom he personally liked never truly got the attention it deserved. The scio-economic comparison to the somewhat socialist idea of urban gardens and the reversal or people from the factories to the fields would have been great.

The photos were a weak compliment to her words.

Overall, I think its a great persuasion on urban gardening and reclaiming empty space for more of nature's sake. As always in Harpers, a well written piece.
Get the subscription, its worth it.
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Lafayette
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Username: Lafayette

Post Number: 19
Registered: 03-2007
Posted on Monday, June 25, 2007 - 3:08 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

I get the sense that Rebecca's intention wasn't a straight-ahead news examination of the blight problem in Detroit and how urban gardening can save it, but rather more of a memoir/essay approach to connecting what she thought were the dots of blight eradication and urban gardening. In that genre, I don't think she was obligated to mention all the possible dots and possible connections - she chose two, blight and urban gardening - and connected them in more of a day-in-the-life-of-an-intrepid -nomad approach. That's why I only take issue with her citing urban gardening as the panacea to all of Detroit's problems or making it out to have more impact than it currently has.

Vas - that said, the Rivera mural issue would have been another interesting route for Rebecca to have explored. You bring up an interesting point.
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Pam
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Username: Pam

Post Number: 2004
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Posted on Monday, July 02, 2007 - 2:29 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Bump for jjaba
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Jjaba
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Username: Jjaba

Post Number: 5423
Registered: 11-2003
Posted on Monday, July 02, 2007 - 4:10 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

jjaba thanks you for this connection. He just read the article and Lowell's response echoed jjaba's.

If Detroit was such a farming cmmunity, some of the $20 Billion in farm subsidies in Red States NOT to farm would come to Detroit. Now there's economic development, eh.

Declare 5% of the Westside and 50% of the Eastside prime corn and soy bean country. Stack some old tractors and combines in a corner, and get some subsidy payments for not growing crops.

The Harpers article told is like it tis about blight, but really missed the boat with sustainable urban agriculture.

Some American cities have 35 yr. old public community garden programs run by Parks and Recreation. Such urban gardeners include the homeless or churches who re-distribute the produce to the poor. "Produce for People" operates in Portland, Oregon for example with 35 community gardens in every vacant nook and crany. Plots are 20X20 ft. Residents sign up and pay $45 annually. Elephant zoo doo is delivered free. Wood chips and mulch delivered free. Free water, free shed with tools. People take the bus to their garden.

In UK, the English have been farming up to their lot lines for centuries. The Japanese farm rice up to the cement wall breaks with their homes.
Detroit had communal victory gardens in the 1890s under the Administration of Hazen "Potato Patch" Pingree. There is plenty of legacy, if there is the will.

jjaba.

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