Current location:	The Treehouse
Current mood:	contemplative
Current music:	Freeway Noise
Entry tags:	bicycling, detroit, environment, urban farming

Detroit as a green city of the future, who'd have thought.
Hat Tip to The Energy Bulletin, which reposted part of the first article and linked to the second today.

New York Times: Bike Among the Ruins:
By TOBY BARLOW

ONE night a little over a year ago, crossing Woodward Avenue, I crashed my bicycle. As I flew head over heels across Detroit’s main boulevard, I thought, well, in any other town, I’d be hitting a car right about now. But this being the Motor City, the street was deserted, completely motor-free.

While bike enthusiasts in most urban areas continue to have to fight for their place on the streets, Detroit has the potential to become a new bicycle utopia. It’s a town just waiting to be taken. With well less than half its peak population, and free of anything resembling a hill, the city and its miles and miles of streets lie open and empty, beckoning. And lately, whether it’s because of the economy or the price of gas or just because it’s a nice thing to do, there are a lot more bikers out riding.

IMHO, this is a prime example of making lemonade out of lemons. Even so, the writer is correct; this is a good town for cycling, at least in terms of the straight streets and flat, open terrain. Some of the suburbs would be a different matter. Parts of Bloomfield Hills, Bloomfield Township, and West Bloomfield would be a real adventure to bike in.

Despite the press, survival here isn’t so hard.

 

Businesses like the Wheelhouse and the Hub have already shown how well Detroit can work as a new business hothouse. With the legendarily affordable real estate and without needing to pay for car payments, gas or insurance, bicyclists could rebuild Detroit into a model of a two-wheeled economy. They could pass laws promoting bikes over cars and designate entire avenues motor-free zones, which, given the state of many of them now, wouldn’t be so much of a stretch.

Maybe it sounds far-fetched, but then again maybe it’s just destiny. Look at a map and you’ll see that Detroit is designed in the shape of a wheel, with streets emanating like spokes from the downtown hub. It looks like a premonition, a city uniquely designed to alter transportation forever.

I've already said that the next time I move, it will be to withing cycling distance of work. Looks like I'll not only be doing something good for my body, as well as the environment, I might just be doing something trendy, too.

Speaking of all the above...

Common Dreams: Urban Agriculture as a Career Path
by Olga Bonfiglio

DETROIT — “I want to be an urban farmer,” said Tom Howe, 19, a freshman at Wayne State University. “I want to start a community garden in some kind of ecovillage with farmers and chefs.”

This may seem an unusual career goal for a young man of the twenty-first century, let alone one from Birmingham, an upscale middle class suburb of Detroit. It’s also counter-intuitive that a major university located in the middle of the cultural center could offer Howe a means to his aspirations.

But Howe is a member of WSU’s Sustainable Food Systems Education and Engagement in Detroit or “SEED Wayne” for short, a program that was instituted last May.

I bet Wayne State never thought they'd be encroaching onto Michigan State's territory. MSU is all about agriculture, including a thriving organic farming program that was instituted at the students' request.

More from Common Dreams.

Howe’s first exposure to the city’s urban gardens occurred at Earthworks when he volunteered to work in its 1,300-square-foot greenhouse as part of his high school service requirement while he was a student at the University of Detroit-Jesuit. The greenhouse produces and distributes more than 100,000 vegetable seedlings for the city’s 355 backyard, community, and school gardens.

Earthworks was started in 1997 by Brother Rick Samyn after he noticed that the poor were buying their food at gas stations, and kids were calling Coke and chips a meal. He began a small garden on a vacant lot and two years later developed six other lots by removing debris and regenerating the soil with compost.

Today the gardens supply fresh, organic produce for the Capuchin Soup Kitchen, which prepares 2,000 meals per day. They also provide 25 million pounds of food a year, equivalent to 65,000 meals per day to the Gleaners Community Food Bank, another Capuchin spin-off.

This is the urban farming venture in Detroit with which I'm most familiar. I'm glad to see it's getting national attention.

So, Detroit as a green city of the future, with urban farms between urban villages that are connected by bike paths. Sounds like an environmentalist's version of utopia. I don't know if the current residents are ready to get on board with that vision, though.