Motor City Green: A Century of Landscapes and Environmentalism in Detroit

Motor City Green explores the ways that Detroiters maintained green landscapes in the rapidly growing Motor City during the long twentieth century (between the late 1800s and early 2000s). Author Joseph Stanhope Cialdella identifies personal investment and public projects dedicated to retaining and creating gardens as the city experienced a growth spurt comparable to other industrial centers. Cialdella describes the result as "a landscape in a perpetual state of ruin and repair" (13). Motor City Green makes clear that both nature parks designed for recreation and utilitarian vegetable plots factored into the repair and that home gardens as well as horticultural and landscape gardening businesses count as urban agriculture and warrant attention as part of urban environmentalism.Cialdella has written an "urban environmental history of parks and gardens" covering the 139 square miles that make up Detroit (5). His work provides context to better understand the precedent for new agri-urban forms, as he calls them, that residents in the majority Black city have built as they revitalize the ruined and vacant (78 percent of Detroit residents are African American, based on the 2020 census). Detroit was, in fact, "green, urban, and industrial" throughout the twentieth century (9). Urban farming and gardening cohabitated with green spaces and parks. Cialdella lays the groundwork for his urban environmental history with designation of the seven-hundred-acre Belle Isle as a city park in 1881 and formation of Pingree's Potato Patches in 1893, a project of Mayor Hazen S. Pingree. Yet agriculture motivated colonizers, as the French long-lot survey system and mapping of the Park Lots and Ten Thousand Acre Tract by 1810, make clear. This area, not addressed by Cialdella, attracted small general farms and market gardens until urban expansion pushed the farmers further from the city during the 1870s and 1880s, coincident to Belle Isle's designation and facilitating the food crisis that Pingree's "potato-patch plan" to aid the poor and unemployed in the city attempted to address (29–30).Cialdella explores strategies that Black Detroiters pursued in and beyond the city to have gardens and green space. The Detroit Urban League (DUL) shaped an "urban environmental ethic" during the 1920s and 1930s through community and neighborhood parks, yards, and gardens (47). Black neighborhoods became the site of cleanup campaigns as well as ornamental plantings. Not all subscribed to the city beautiful movement, however, as some moved into sparsely populated areas like Eight Mile-Wyoming, believing that "I'd like a better house, but I'd rather have something to eat" (68). The DUL also invested in a recreational camp for youth, purchasing land outside of Detroit, near Jackson, Michigan. Their plan began in 1930, focused on teaching urban youth about the advantages of recreation, health, environmental quality, and racial justice through experiences at a lakeside camp, Green Pastures. The advantages of outdoor retreats for Black youth did not inform those expanding metropolitan parks after World War II. Instead, as Detroit's Black population increased, white planners concentrated park development outside the city boundaries. This "suburban . . . environmentalism cultivated significant inequalities between Detroit and its growing suburbs" with the suburbs gaining the advantages of environmental stewardship (107).Cialdella concludes Motor City Green with a chapter on the importance of nature and agriculture and community in Detroit's revitalization efforts, launched in earnest during the 1970s. No unified plan guided (or guides) these efforts, instead "competing ideas and interests shaped the meaning behind making the motor city green" (137). During his first term in office, Coleman A. Young, Detroit's first Black mayor, launched the Farm-A-Lot program in 1974. Residents could request a vacant city lot and advice on how to garden and join the effort to fight "rising food prices and inner-city blight" (139). Residents experienced in gardening became role models for both food gardens and ornamental plantings, but when USDA funding through the Urban Gardening Program ended in 1993, these efforts slowly faded, but they nonetheless laid the groundwork for ongoing green initiatives such as Keep Growing Detroit, the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, and Greening of Detroit.Cialdella surveys a topic of particular interest to agricultural historians, but also of increasing interest to policymakers, environmental stewardship advocates, and urban farmers—the history of farming in one city. Sustainable food systems factor into city planning today, particularly for those environmentally conscious elected officials seeking to reduce carbon emissions. Histories of the ways that farming and food factored into city planning historically can resonate with them. The author limited his coverage to one long century. Cities invested in agriculture before the 1880s, as histories of urban markets make clear. More remains to be done to provide histories that can best inform today's decisions about sustainable food futures.