a green ring between the city and exurbs

http://www.businessgreen.com/busines...-farm-downtown

this may be a repost - but perhaps something completely radical / unexpected and reasonably economical / self sustaining is what we need.

the more i think about this the more i think its viable. i believe i heard a WDET article this morning talking about how detroit has one of the highest percentages of jobs located outside the core of the city.

if so - a green ring could serve both the inner city and the exurbs on several levels of need. it certainly would be cheaper and more useful than tract housing or strip malls considering the economy.

Isn't that essentially what Washington D.C. has with all its monument and park presence?

yes - but the article is talking about farms, and parks.

farms/parks - monuments/parks - minor difference

My intended point was what has it done for D.C.? It seems to just isolate the city's problems more.

Is it the cheap land or inexpensive labor that makes this attractive?

This isn't a green ring between the city and exurbs, it's a green blob between one part of the city and another part of the city. From the thread title it sounded like you wanted to bulldoze a swath of land along M-59 and I-275 or something like that.

If this is just another land-grab by corporate farming interests, then I'm certainly NOT for it.

Only if this is a public/private partnership will it stand a chance of working.

Also, only if organic farming is allowed will it be acceptable. Pesticides are one of the chief causes of bee colony collapse, and they would be necessary to cross-pollinate any crops.

Flower gardens, ornamental tree farms, wooded stands, public parks, and perhaps a dense woods such as Palmer Woods could be started on the east side. Think the Bois de Boulogne in Paris.

I think we need to get away from farming Christmas trees.

Getting the universities involved, especially those specializing in agriculture is a super idea. This should fold nicely into creating and retaining jobs and perhaps diversifying the state's industries.

I can see that a bad economy is giving rise to bad ideas. The idea that you can convert an urban environment into working farms is wrong on so many levels. The existing efforts in Detroit to create neighborhood parks and community gardens is the right direction to go. This idea of megafarms inside the city isn't.