PRI-De: A Detroit Story
Community Projects, Demonstration Sites, Economics, Education Centres, Urban Projects — by Killian OBrien January 28, 2010
 Detroit: time to turn the problem into the solution |
Permaculture in Detroit seems like a bit of an oxymoron, but urban agriculture is blooming all over the city. From the city-wide efforts of The Greening of Detroit in educating people on gardening techniques to the smaller-scale efforts of individuals such as Kate Devlin and her Spirit of Hope garden to groups such as the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network and their 2-acre D-Town Farm and the Georgia Street Community Gardens/Collective, community gardens are being sown on vacant lots dotting this city of nearly a million, filling the holes left by the loss of nearly half its peak auto industry-driven population. Photos of the streets of Detroit from eras long past and rusted nearly away show tightly packed, neat homes. Today, half those homes have devolved into ruins or grassy, often debris-filled, lots. Estimates on the number of lots range from 60,000 to 80,000. Those numbers don’t include the many parks now being left largely untended by the city government.
This devastation didn’t come suddenly, but slowly, and as surely, as Katrina, but with more destruction. When the auto industry left town, they left a city. When they left their factories, they left the people. When they left, they started a slow cataclysm. New Orleans lost a couple hundred thousand people. Detroit has lost nearly a million – a slow-motion tidal wave of economic destruction. Unemployment is, and has been, far above the national average for a long time. There are no major chain grocery stores or warehouse-style stores within the city limits of Detroit, making the city a virtual food desert. Residents must either pay exorbitant prices for inferior food or travel out of the city to get decent prices and (somewhat) nutritious food. The best efforts of those building community gardens throughout the city still is but a brief shower in this desert compared to the wasteland that is this once-thriving city.
But what remains is a perfect template for rebirth: water, land, idle hands and a food desert. Detroit has the potential to become the first truly major American city that can provide a large majority of its own food, and in a way that protects the environment while reducing carbon emissions. It’s estimated that Victory Gardens provided up to 40% of all vegetables during World War II. With well-organized, intensive gardening, we can easily exceed that number. If ever Permaculture principles are to be applied on a massive scale, at a grassroots level, this is the place and this is the time.
But Detroit is not an easy city. She is wary. Many feel they have paid their dues here and look on strangers with suspicion. Long-term residents are often jaded beyond reaching. They’ve been left for dead, fooled time after time by big talk and little or no action. Consider Detroit the Show Me city. It’s not easy to come here with an idea or a plan and expect others to accept you. They won’t, by-and-large, even if they like the plan and see a buck or two hanging out of your pocket. They’ve seen both before. Of course, very few have ever heard of Permaculture, much less understand what it is. This can even be true among the “green” movement as one person said to me, “Permaculture isn’t the be-all and end-all” of agriculture. They were right. As you likely know if you are reading this, Permaculture doesn’t mean permanent agriculture, it means permanent culture. It’s not a system of agriculture, but of system design. It’s a way of designing our homes and communities so they can be sustainable and resilient. Food just happens to be a very important part of continuing to live and necessarily gets a lot of attention from anyone wanting to be self-reliant, eco-friendly, and eat fresh, healthy food grown in harmony with the rest of Nature.
Permaculture gardens in Detroit
Detroit needs a new permanent culture to replace the car culture that has abandoned it. Detroit has a plan in place to reorganize the city, but it is anything but harmonious with nature despite providing a lot of green space. Detroit is a very large city by area. The city plan outlines areas of the city large enough to be small cities themselves as areas for (re)development with large areas of green space surrounding them. Any permaculturist will recognize the folly of this as being nothing more than how cities have always been: pack the people together for efficiency and ship everything in. We’d rather see small, walkable, self-reliant communities built along primary thoroughfares that are both enclosed by green space and with each home(stead) having enough space immediately around it to grow at least their primary kitchen vegetables, perhaps connected by light rail, trolleys or other electrically powered mass transit system.
The Permaculture and Resilience Initiative – Detroit (PRI-De) will work with others to make Permaculture an important part of the rebirth of the Motor City as the Motor of Urban Agriculture. PRI-De will be offering PDC’s with a strong urban component in recognition of the great need for urban populations to redesign their access to food and energy within the context of an uncertain future. We will be applying the funds from paying students to provide Permaculture training to local residents on a scholarship basis. We will also expand into workshops that highlight green tech and sustainability.
Recession or not, people can provide for their own needs
Over time, we hope to have a staff that is virtually all local residents with some, if not all, trained at PRI-De. It is our hope these graduates will be active in creating Permaculture-based homesteads for themselves to demonstrate the value of their training, that they will be active in their neighborhoods helping their families, friends and neighbors to feed themselves, that they will be active in working for food justice and that they will help design a truly sustainable Detroit.
PRI-De is associated nationally and internationally with the Permaculture Research Institute of the USA and the Permaculture Research Institute of Australia as a Permaculture Master Plan project. We will hold our first PDC in March/April 2010.
Killian O’Brien
PRI-De (under construction)
admin (at) pri-de.org
(313) 647-4015
This is refreshing and hopeful news for those of us here in the States. Hopefully other major (and minor) US cities will follow suit.
Comment by Arian I. — January 29, 2010 @ 9:32 am
I am a little confused. I thought permaculture techniques had to do with planting trees for cover and and certain crops next to each other so there is year round soil maximization as well as not tilling, xtra mulching, and designing to maximize water from rainfall and grey water. These look like community gardens to me. Explain, someone, please?
I do not mean to sound disrespectful. Obviously this is a permaculture site. I also thought permaculture was designed to kind of work on or near its own eventually.
Comment by Pamela — January 29, 2010 @ 11:50 am
Hello Pamela,
I’ll try to get a response from those more knowledgeable than myself, but as a teacher of English as a Foreign Language in a former life, let me answer somewhat pedantically.
We tend to use the terms method, technique, system and approach interchangeably in everyday speech, but they do have different semantic inferences. System and approach have to do with the overall manner or philosophy that guides actions while technique, in particular, refers, in this context, to the specific actions one takes as influenced by the system or approach.
For example, a garden might use all the techniques you mention, but not be an example of permaculture while being an excellent example of an efficient or organic garden. But if that garden uses petroleum-based fertilizer and pesticides, it would likely not be considered organic or permaculture-based. Also, if it is organized such that an orchard blocked sunlight to the vegetables, chickens were housed outside the front door, water was captured in barrels but allowed to simply spill over when full, you’d likely not be looking at a garden influenced by permaculture.
Another example would be a chicken coop that is only used for egg and meat production and is fed with store-bought grains, etc. That would perhaps be a fair economic choice, but not necessarily one that would be recognized as reflecting permaculture because it is not integrated into the life cycle of the garden and homestead in a way that creates circles of life, if you will. If the droppings, for example, are simply thrown away and not used as fertilizer, we’re being neither as efficient as we might be nor are we exhibiting a good example of permaculture design.
Simply put, permaculture isn’t a set of techniques, as much as it is a philosophy of how to use the many gardening/farming techniques out there.
I hope this answers your questions and I apologize if my post was confusing.
Cheers
Comment by Killian — January 30, 2010 @ 4:33 am
Arian,
Unfortunately, the changes in Detroit are driven much more by economic considerations than anything else. The city has many, many lots available, but will not deed or sell them to gardeners because they want to sell them at higher prices, or to entities that will pay more taxes. It is illegal to have chickens (though it is legal to build a small coop). There is no tax break for even market gardens, so far as I know. One cannot currently build a straw bale building. I cannot simply build myself a green house without going through a permitting process that is rather arduous. There are people in the city government and certainly among the citizenry working to change these things, but process is slow.
D-Town farm mentioned in the article took two or three years to get official approval for gardens from what I understand. The Georgia Street Community Garden is trying to expand legally, but is facing some challenges.
Part of what we hope to accomplish with PRI-De is to help move these processes along, and part of that will be accomplished by bringing more and more people here for training to see how gritty urban gardening, even guerrilla gardening, happens and the challenges urban gardeners can face that go above and beyond growing your garden. Some of them might add their voices to the chorus, or will take the refrain back to their own towns and cities where similar restrictions apply and work to remove them.
Cheers
Comment by Killian — January 30, 2010 @ 4:48 am
Hi Killian. Keeping chickens may well be illegal in Detroit, but I’ll give the link below just in case that’s actually just a widely believed rumour rather than actual fact, as the guy in the clip linked to below discovered for Chicago.
http://permaculture.org.au/2010/01/30/chicagos-chicken-ordinance/
Comment by Craig Mackintosh — January 30, 2010 @ 5:15 am
Nope, it is illegal. Just checked.
But, seems it’s not stopping people:
http://www.grit.com/Flocking-to-the-City/The-Chicks-Arrive.aspx
And from another post:
“A recent seminar at the Ferguson Academy on raising chickens in your backyard — which began with a disclaimer that the practice is illegal in Detroit — had more than 100 attendees.” – http://detnews.com/article/20090424/LIFESTYLE14/904240359/Urban-gardeners-nurture-nature-in-Detroit#ixzz0e1ypLat2
It’s high time we legalised sustainability.
Comment by Craig Mackintosh — January 30, 2010 @ 5:23 am
Fascinating, isn’t it, Craig? I can’t but agree with you, of course. Besides, we’re all just ignoring the ordinance, anyway. If neighbors complain, then the trouble begins, so no roosters is the general rule of thumb. (Don’t need them for laying, anyway.)
Thanks for poking around, but, yes, I was sure.
Cheers
Comment by Killian — January 30, 2010 @ 2:37 pm
“Unfortunately, the changes in Detroit are driven much more by economic considerations than anything else. The city has many, many lots available, but will not deed or sell them to gardeners because they want to sell them at higher prices, or to entities that will pay more taxes.”
Wow. Where do I start with this? Critizing an impoverished city because they want to actually get something for their land? Maybe that’s the one thing, the only thing that the Democrats who’ve run Detroit for decades are doing right. Do you see them doing anything else right? Not me. Detroit is a disaster zone because of their policies for other reasons, like high taxes, failed schools, and non-market oriented policies.
Try opening an economics book because this comment displays profound ignorance of how human systems work. Are you really saying that the city gov should give everything away? What about poor people? Don’t you want to make sure there are lots of money for welfare, free services, and taxpayer-paid infrastructure. You must be anti-poor!
The author does no better: “We’d rather see small, walkable, self-reliant communities built along primary thoroughfares.” Of course you would, who wouldn’t want that? So, if you create a bunch of gardens, you’ve created an artificial housing shortage, and house prices will go up. You wouldn’t want to force all the low-income people to move out of the area, would you? And fewer houses and smaller towns mean smaller economies of scale. Everything gets more expensive again impacting the poor-except perhaps food, bravo! What is with this war on low-income people? That’s to say nothing of the collapse of the tax base from its already paltry levels.
Comment by truthiness — January 31, 2010 @ 8:09 am
truthiness
When a city has tens of thousands of empty lots that are overgrown and littered with trash but will not sell them to gardeners because they want to sell them to people who will pay higher taxes there is clearly other reasons besides common sense. Why would they keep so many lots abandoned over letting them, be cleaned up and gardened until they can actually find someone to build on the lot? Or just sell the lots at a discounted price if we agree to re-forest the lot (a productive food forest :+)
The problem with the property prices in Detroit is that the homes were paid for in full then abandoned. The city got them free and does nothing but let them rot away and charges tax every year like the home still has its original value. So when a home sits for 10 years or more empty and is junk the taxes have built up to more than anyone would be willing to pay.
Same goes with empty lots. The taxes build up over the years even with the city doing nothing to keep up the property. So if you want to buy empty lots that are sitting doing nothing they are priced the same as a lot with a decent house on them.
Comment by Lost Chief — February 17, 2010 @ 9:22 am
Truthiness, (or shall we call you Gregg?) your response was difficult to follow. When decisions are made for purely economic reasons it indicates several things to me. 1. They are not considering true prosperity. 2. They are not considering quality of life. 3. They are not considering those residents that most need opportunity. When lots used for urban agriculture are taxed at rates that make urban agriculture too expensive for any but the well-heeled, how is that taking care of the citizens?
A number of your comments fail logically. This one, for example: “So, if you create a bunch of gardens, you’ve created an artificial housing shortage.” In what way? Multi-family dwellings are not illegal. Not only are multi-family dwellings more efficient than single-family dwellings, but putting six families on one lot and leaving five lots to support them – which should be able to provide all or most of their vegetables, herbs and fruit – hardly creates a housing shortage.
It is impossible to tell what your real point here is.
Comment by Killian — February 20, 2010 @ 3:34 pm
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