Argriculture & Anarchy, the Route to Detroit's Revival?

[detourdetroit]

maybe what's unique about the potential of detroit is that there can be a hybrid of those two world views. i don't necessarily see them as incompatible.

a couple of random thoughts:

i've been told that when detroit was at its industrial height during the war it ALSO grew something like 60-80% of its own produce because people grew stuff in their yards.

one of my worries with the farm movement in detroit is not that it's a bad thing [[it's not, it's wonderful), but that people see it as the ONLY thing. for as many people as the greening and planting of the city can feed, farming is not an ecomically sustainable practice in terms of how many people can actually earn a living off the land. the answer is NOT 900,000...i'd be surprised if that figure was any more than 9,000.

so where does that leave us? well, speaking from personal experience, i think we'd be more able to marry the two notions english alludes to if we could get to a place where the "micro" and "local" aspects of our economy were operating on a much more pervasive and significant level. where we could diminish the debt and burden of the capitalistic national [[and global) economic hegemony and grow a locally scaled economy that is more self sufficient and less reliant on the corporate masters.

what the digital age affords is a truly place based economy that, if made attractive, would gestate the local banks, bakers, musicians, makers, web mavens, and tradespeople in equal measure...