Kick out the jams

This summer, on July 18, the 310 year-old American city of Detroit filed for bankruptcy. Motor Town’s descent into the abyss of real estate meltdown and black poverty, has become a symbool of the decline of the once mighty West. But people have been rebuilding hope, from the margins and with their own hands. Detroit should be a symbol of resilience, too.

Fort Pontchartrain du Detroit first came to light in 1701 as a strategically located French trading post on the border with Canada. In 1910, Detroit was mentioned for the first time in the Top 10 largest American cities. The enormous car industry, with next to Ford, Chrysler and General Motors hundreds of other companies, led to a population explosion peaking at 1,8 million people in the 1950s and declining to a mere 700,000 in 2010. In the 1950s, the majority of the population was white and middle class. In 2010, the majority was black and jobless.

‘Shrinking cities’ are nothing new, and even if by 2050 more than 70% of the world’s population will live in cities, there will be urban winners and losers. As well as the pioneer of a new urbanity, Detroit is also an extreme example of its failure. The miracle city had great assets such as the Detroit River, Lakes Eerie and St. Clair, a direct tunnel and bridge to Canada, monumental parks and architectural landmarks, a solid school system and the best paid working class of America with self-owned houses, cars and holidays. Culture flourished: there were three opera houses, Diego Rivera started painting his world famous Detroit Industry Murals in 1932 and in 1959 Berry Gordy founded the Motown record label triggering the breakthrough of Afro-American music with white audiences.

The enormous influx of people, in particular Afro-Americans from the south, fueled social tensions, with as a consequence the Detroit Race Riot in 1943 and the Twelfth Street Riot in 1967. Increasing oil prices and a decline in the demand for American cars led to mass firings, the transfer of industry and companies to the suburbs, followed by the white middle class and with it the shops, jobs and taxes. The black, low-paid core population stayed behind, without jobs, without public transport living in the midst of increasing dereliction and decline. In the 1970s, the situation further degenerated when the city began systematically closing down schools, fire and police stations.

Detroit was still surrounded by the richest suburbs in the US but these sucked all the resources out of the city. A disaster plan was not foreseen.

Megalomania

“It breaks my heart but it started more than 40 years ago,” says John Sinclair. The now 72 year-old jazz poet, political activist and founder of the White Panther Party lives part-time in Amsterdam from where he broadcasts his legendary blues- and jazz-internet radio program and grows his own variety of marijuana seed. “At micro level there are great projects, people, fantastic music and art – which has always been the case – but the infrastructure for civic society has gone, exchanged for life in the suburbs. A bad trade if you ask me but it was a planned strategy. Look at all the highways in the city. The white middle class created the whole system and then left. They no longer wanted to live in a city with all these blacks; they wanted their own white neighborhoods. And now they want the city back, so they refuse to invest in the people who were left behind in the hope that they will just disappear, exactly like what happened in New Orleans. You cannot understand anything about a metropolis in the US or about Detroit if you ignore racism.”

When the first Afro-American mayor Coleman Young (in office from 1974 to 1994) realized that industry would not return and the middle class even less so, he tried to save the city with immense building projects like the downtown Renaissance Center, the new General Motors Detroit/Hamtramck factory (1980) and the Chrysler Jefferson North Assembly (1991). But the free market was not ready to provide Detroit with education, local jobs, electricity, transport, health and safety. Massive protests by inhabitants could not prevent complete residential neighborhoods from being further dismantled and alas the social debates never led to a change in electoral behavior. From 1995, Young’s successor Dennis Archer continued with megalomaniac building projects, amongst which new sports stadia for the Detroit Tigers and the Lions, while the rest of the city literally sank away in outdated industrial infrastructures, overgrown vacant lots and increasing violence. As Allan Sanderson, economist at the University of Chicago stated: “If you want to inject money into the local economy, it would be better to drop it from a helicopter than invest it in a new ballpark.”

In the 1990s, the dubious tenure of the multiple-times convicted mayor Kwame Kilpatrick – for perjury, sex scandals and fraud – was accompanied by an unparalleled rise in chronic corruption. The debts mounted up. Millions of dollars disappeared from the public school system and nobody knew where the money went. More than half of the remaining population was retired or no longer active and that caused the fatal erosion of the city’s pension funds, one of the main reasons behind Detroit filing for bankruptcy.

Fabulous ruins

In 2013, Detroit’s total debt amounted 18,5 billion dollars. The Governor of Michigan, Rick Snyder, appointed the lawyer Kevyn Orr as emergency manager with extraordinary control over Detroit’s finances. Orr started his 18-month term in March this year and on his recommendation the City of Detroit filed for bankruptcy four months later.

“Orr is doing fantastic work,” says Stirling aka Alden Gallup II, since 1965 the undisputed night mayor of Detroit. Sterling drives around in a decrepit Prius with the backseats removed and an axe in a plastic bag between his feet to chase off carjackers. “Do I sound like a Reaganite? Which I’m not! But the economic arithmetic needs to be done. Just like in Spain, France and Greece. If Chrysler wants to open up another factory and if Donald Trump expresses his will to invest, what are you going to do? Turn them down? Everyday is Halloween here, since decennia. When you are at the bottom, there is only one way to go and that is up. The new major – whoever it will be – is going to have to do a good job. The priorities are known. Whatever happens, all these activists, artists and urban farmers will continue. Building cultural solidarity is the only way to make the necessary transition.”

Since bankruptcy was declared in July, numerous articles and documentaries have reported on just how bad the situation is in Detroit. And it is. Racism, crime, abandoned houses, empty streets, vacant factories, no streetlights and the repeated advice never to stand still at a red light (slowing down is enough, except in downtown). These reports depict the fabulous ruins of Detroit against soundtracks from Motown, techno, Eminem or White Stripes – depending on the age of the producers. Detroiters don’t really get the esthetics of it all. Nobody really asked their opinion anyway. When there was national ‘Schadenfreude’ about the breakdown of Detroit, then the regional ‘Schadenfreude’ was even bigger, and directly related to race. Did the race riots of 1967 predict what came to pass? Or were these riots precisely the reason for the decline? People don’t talk that much about the Detroit race riots anymore. Nor did this year’s 50th anniversary of the Walk to Freedom on Detroit’s Woodward Avenue make front-page news. It was here in April 1963 that Martin Luther King Jr. gave a debut of his iconic ‘I have a Dream’ speech that would become world news a couple of months later in Washington DC.

Some foreign documentaries did give Detroiters a forum: Searching for Sugarman, Detropia, Detroit je t’aime and From Glasgow to Detroit. Suddenly Detroit became a story of faces and behind every face was a project, an engagement that often went back more than thirty years.

Grassroots

The power of creativity to change lives began in 1986 with Tyree Guyton who together with his grandfather started The Heidelberg project. They bought a bleak street with ravaged houses and transformed them into artworks that became a tourist attraction. Most recently, there are plans to covert unused parts of the street for urban agriculture.

In 1992 the political activists James and Grace Lee Boggs launched Detroit City of Hope, a resilient campaign and a direct call to Detroiters to start creating meaningful jobs themselves. Major investments by Coleman Young had revealed that Detroit would not be saved by one kind of industry or company. And when Young suggested casinos as the ultimate do-it-yourself, the Boggs thought enough was enough. The Boggs are a household name in Detroit and the networking engine behind the blue-collar workers, civil servants, teachers and cultural workers who were concerned about the economic, political and moral disintegration of their city. Since 1995 the Boggs Center communicates about the countless grassroots activists and actions in Detroit, amongst which Cass Corridor Commons, the Hush House, the Boggs School and Women Creating Caring Communities are the best known. In their wake, many cooperatives for childcare, neighborhood watch and art collectives have emerged but also anarchistic demolition teams like the Motor City Blight Busters and the Lawn Mower Brigade, a team of motorized lawn mowers that clear overgrown vacant lots. Grace Lee Boggs is now 98 and does not like doing too many interviews anymore. Her latest book, The Next American Revolution (2011) and the boggscenter.org and dcoh.org blogs should suffice.

In a short space of time, Detroit became the DIY city par excellence in which negative spaces were claimed as creative workplaces. The rest is reserved for urban agriculture. However, the problems of the city remain linked to the size of the wasteland: Detroit stretches over 360 square kilometers and counts around 150,000 vacant or empty (building) lots – a surface roughly the size of Manhattan. Official support or control is not available in these parts of the city. “A few houses here, a couple there, no electricity, how do you re-construct that while preserving the soul of the city? In Detroit a lot of grassroots projects don’t have the time to grow. They are personal, small, sometimes open, local but not connected. In such an environment, where survival is hard, people are protective of their own thing,” says Maria Luisa Rossi, professor at the College for Creative Studies. “Here, architects and planners have to do exactly the opposite of what they normally do: shrinking. Communicating that message to the citizens is the hardest.” Especially when ‘shrinking’ implies ‘moving’, since the actual shrinking has been done at most levels. A returning proposition is the relocation of habitants of run-down and mainly empty blocks of streets to better, more habitable neighborhoods or new developments where they would access a basic provision of services.

“My grandfather has always lived in Hamtramck and even when they threatened to build a bridge over his house, he refused to move. If you have nothing left to lose, leaving your house and trusted surroundings is the very last step – that you don’t want to take.” Peter Markus is senior writer for the InsideOut project for underprivileged black kids. “The city has a very positive dynamic notwithstanding all the problems. The challenge is that while it is such a huge space, people are locked into their own district. Public transportation is nonexistent. For a dollar fifty, a kid from the Bronx, or Brooklyn or Washington Heights, can ride the New York subway and sit down next to someone who is reading a book before suddenly arriving in Times Square… I think that sense of wonder is very important for people to experience. Here in Detroit a sense of wonder is harder to come by. If you are out there as a black kid, wherever you are, how do you get somewhere else, especially if you are poor? Often they cannot look beyond their own backyard, which is maybe not a place with many possibilities. At the same time, there is the unavoidable process of gentrification because students and professionals, who come here to study and work, ask for neighborhoods where they can walk safely on foot. Detroit is full of holes. We must think complementarily and not competitively and start filling up these holes through grassroots movements.”

Soup kitchens

More than 20 years ago the Detroit science teacher Paul Weertz bought a couple of street blocks around Farnsworth Street. Weertz is not a developer but taught agriculture at the Catherine Ferguson School for pregnant girls and teenage mothers. In his free time he plowed the vacant lots in between the houses on Farnsworth and started growing alfalfa with considerable success. His call to young creative people to become part of the Farnsworth community resulted in free bicycle repair places like The Black Alley Bikes and The Hub, urban agriculture projects such as Rising Pheasants and people like Jef Surgess from the MIT-supported technological atelier Mt Elliott Makerspace moving in. All these initiatives engage underprivileged kids and their parents in shaping the future of their own neighborhood in the first place and of Detroit in the second.

The house on the corner of Farnsworth Street and Moran Street became a pioneering location when in 2008 the artist and activist Kt Andresky, who was part of the Million Fishes Art Collective in San Francisco, together with photographer Garrett MacLean and printmaker Blake Carroll, moved in. They patched up the house with material from abandoned and burned out residences. The former church front where Sister Estelle Laster gave local residents bible lectures and a warm meal until she died in 2000 became The YesFarm. Pretty soon the art collective grew from a workspace and gallery into a neighborhood center where every opening merged into a street party or a collective harvest or planting session. The best strategy to get everyone involved was Kt going from door to door, even if the first inhabited house was three streets away. At the beginning of 2013, The YesFarm was no longer allowed to hold public events because of safety reasons. While waiting for the necessary (money for) repairs or a new space to host the collective, Kt teaches in the Roosevelt Primary School and in the soup kitchens where small children, kids and adults come for a daily meal.

“We have to start in our backyard, where the situation is the most desperate. For the children in my classes, food is something that is sold in gas stations. Some of them live in home shelters, others in comparable hopeless situations that they call ‘home’. They often have to walk more than an hour to get to school, and always through derelict and run-down neighborhoods. Of course they are not always in the mood for education. A boy took a bite of a cherry tomato cultivated at The YesFarm and spit it out. ‘Too much ketchup!’ he shouted. Is that a step forward or backward? Detroit is an empty page, so whatever someone does, is always better than what is here. Giving up is not an option.”

The turning point has been reached according to Kt Andresky. Fewer people are leaving, more people are moving in. Also opportunists. “A lot of newcomers do not want crack heads or poor black people in their neighborhood and they support the option to relocate unstable people so they can continue to be unstable elsewhere. But moving here and not being willing to collaborate with local children and families is criminal.”

“Forget the big companies and associations,” says Jeff Sturges from Mt Eliott Makerspace. “The most positive thinking that is happening is collaborative rather than competitive, and focusing on the amplification and connection of grassroots people, organizations, businesses and projects rather than just large companies and enterprises. It is a question of making those who stayed behind in the wrong ZIP-code of the city – kids, their families and neighbors – believe in a possible Detroit, just as we do. Why else did we move here in the first place?”

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