HuffPo Blog: Rust Belt Cities and the New Urban Agrarianism

This piece originally appeared on the Huffington Post

In the trying times of the early 1980s, with factory closings exacting a huge social and psychological toll, billboards posted prominently in Buffalo and Detroit read, "Will the last one out of here please turn out the lights?" The message captured the spirit of the age.

Though poverty, depopulation and physical deterioration remain intractable problems thirty years later, the Rust Belt has a new brand. Thanks to the haunting aesthetic power of industrial ruins which seem to have cast a particular spell over European artists and the rich musical forms such as techno, house and hip-hop, that have their origins in the voided spaces left by the evacuation of American corporations, Rust Belt "Chic", as featured in New York Magazine, the New York Times and elsewhere, has recast postindustrial capitals as places of edgy artistic experimentation and DIY sustainability.

With Chrysler's "Imported From Detroit" Super Bowl ad, the re-imagination of the Rust Belt metropolis reached the highest branding platform known to consumer man. It featured the starkly beautiful landscape of a ruined industrial colossus as a backdrop for Clint Eastwood's jingoistic soliloquy on the dream of an American manufacturing resurgence.

Eastwood, of course, made no mention of Chrysler's role in the de-industrializaton and ghetto-ization of Detroit. Between 1950 and 1960, Chrysler cut its Detroit workforce in half, resulting in a loss of almost 60,000 urban jobs, as the corporation decentralized and automated its workforce, shifting production to points south and outlying areas in Michigan.

Putting Madison Avenue's fantasies aside, author Catherine Tumber, in her new book Small, Gritty and Green, notes some legitimate reasons to view Rust Belt cities as uniquely suited for the coming age of energy scarcity. With street plans that predate the auto, many have retained a density and form that fosters pedestrianism and public transportation ridership, despite decades of population loss. An abundance of fresh water, the relatively low cost of housing, existing infrastructure and available land for green-sector production and favorable conditions for hydro, wind and solar power are other comparative advantages in the age of resource constraints.

Cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee and Buffalo have shown special promise as sites of food production. By melding a critical analysis of the corporate food chain with innovative and resourceful community-based production techniques, grassroots groups in these cities have reclaimed large swaths of vacant land for a range of urban agricultural experiments. After more than a decade of experimentation, urban food justice groups have matured into a powerful movement by promoting the most fundamental principle of self-determination: the ability of a community to feed itself.

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