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The Invention of Urban Agriculture The Invention of Urban Agriculture: Crises and Transformations in Detroit, 1893 – Today Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung des Doktorgrades der Philosophie der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München vorgelegt von: Elena Torres Ruiz, M.A. aus Tübingen 2020 Erstgutachter: Prof. Dr. Christof Mauch Zweitgutachter: Prof. Dr. Uwe Lübken Datum der mündlichen Prüfung: 07.07.2020 Table of Contents Acknowledgements iii I. Introduction: Detroit, High Stakes 1 II. Agricultural Identities, Poverty, and Reform: The Birth of Urban Agriculture in Detroit and its Re-Invention (1893-1897 & 1930-1938) 11 Origins: Gardens, Machines, and Selves 12 Agriculture, Youth, and Reform 17 The Origins of Urban Crisis 24 1893: The Birth of Urban Agriculture 26 A Cure for Idleness: Poverty and Reform 27 Relief and Subsistence: Depression-Era Gardens (1931-1937) 28 Detroit Thrift Gardens 30 Urban Homesteads 33 III. Agrarian States of Exception: War Gardens in Detroit and Beyond (1917-1919 and 1942-1945) 37 Agrarian States of Exception 38 The Challenges of Mobilization 40 Racial Transformation 44 Gender and Food 46 “A Spirit of Perseverance”: Cultivating the Home Front 48 Columbia Sowing the Seeds of Victory 50 “Go Forth in the Morning…”: World War I Garden Ecologies (1917-1919) 52 Pro-Kaiser Weeds, Vandalism, and Contested Spaces 53 “Soldiers of the Soil”: The American Victory Garden Campaign (1942-1945) 57 Gendered Temporalities 61 An Arsenal of … Gardens? 66 Detroit’s Economic and Social Transformation 67 “Instead, the Desire is for Actual Volumes…” 70 The Lingering Effects of Victory 77 Detroit’s Revolutionaries 78 i IV. Government Intervention: Urban Agriculture in the Age of Detroit’s Urban Crisis (1967-1994) 88 Government Intervention 89 1967, Rebellion 94 Beginnings 101 Coleman Young: Passionate Industrialist, Reluctant Farmer 104 Planning a New Urban Ecology 105 Philanthropic Dependence 110 “Helping People Do for Themselves:” Managing Socio-Economic Change 112 Detroit and Beyond 123 Welfare, Poverty, and Reform 129 The Limits of Government Intervention 141 V. City of Hope: Citizen Intervention (1988-2008) 147 Citizen Intervention 148 The Gardening Angels 148 Spatial Intervention 156 Philosophical Intervention 159 A Growing Movement 162 Harvest ’88 163 Detroit People’s Festival and Detroit Summer 165 Environmental Citizenship 167 Detroit Agriculture Network 170 VI. Outlook: An Urban Agrarian Myth? (2008-today) 175 Detroit: Saviors? 176 Detroit: Roots! 179 Detroit: Borderlands. 182 Bibliography 186 Archival Sources 187 Other Primary Sources 189 Newspaper Sources 191 Secondary Sources 194 ii Acknowledgements Working on this project and bringing it to completion was an extraordinary experience that would not have been possible without the support of numerous people and institutions. My advisor Prof. Christof Mauch, whose infinite enthusiasm for the field of Environmental Humanities, continuously encouraged and supported me in my endeavor to complete this dissertation. I appreciate his unwavering support and mentorship. I would also like to thank my second advisor Prof. Uwe Lübken for his insightful input and enriching comments. Furthermore, I would like to thank Prof. Charlotte Lerg for encouraging me in my endeavors, for her kind and constructive input, and for her treasured friendship. The German Fulbright Association supported my research with a generous grant that enabled me to delve deep into Detroit’s archives and facilitated an insightful experience in the place of my inquiry. I would also like to thank the staff at the Walter P. Reuther Archive for Labor and Urban Affairs and the Burton Historical Collection for the insightful conversations and helpful advice. The German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. generously enabled me to spend time at the Library of Congress and the National Archives and Records Administration where I was able to find important source material. Prof. Britta Waldschmidt- Nelson provided support and feedback during this research trip. Furthermore, I would like to thank the Bavarian America Academy, namely Prof. Heike Paul and Dr. Marga Schweiger- Wilhelm, for inviting me to their annual Summer School. I fondly remember the discussions and exchanges we had as young scholars. Last but not least, I want to express my gratitude to the Graduate School of Language and Literature of LMU for sponsoring several of my field research and conference trips. Special thanks go out to the countless Detroiters who greeted me with open arms and willingly shared their stories with me. I learned so much about cultivating crops and caring for plants and will continue to integrate this wonderful practice in my life. The time I spent working the fields of Detroit has left a deep imprint on me. The staff and fellows at the Rachel Carson Center and my colleagues at the Amerika Institut, LMU Munich, shaped my PhD experience in similarly impactful ways. Lena Engel, Dayela Valenzuela, Prof. Michael Hochgeschwender, Prof. Sophia Kalantzakos, Prof. Jennifer L. Johnson, and Prof. Andrea Gaynor all helped and inspired me in many ways. My dear parents and my wonderful friends Ruhi, Sarah, and Sasha always had an open ear for my complaints and my concerns, they never tired of offering their support, and I will continue to treasure the strength they gave me when I needed it. Thank you very much. iii The Invention of Urban Agriculture: Crises and Transformations in Detroit, 1893-Today Introduction: Detroit, High Stakes Cities are places of imagination. We imagine from afar and we imagine from within how local customs and (un)built environments shape our lives. We imagine the possibilities (and impossibilities) that we and others may find in specific urban settings. We imagine, based on the stories we have heard, buildings and maps we have seen, and encounters we have had. As our minds interweave these different narratives, sensory impressions, and built environments, our imaginings become more complex. Cities have reputations that stem from such imaginings. The first time I went to Detroit — keenly aware of how premature judgements could obscure my scientific gaze — I had an interesting encounter: In late summer, 2014, I was standing in a particularly viscous queue at Philadelphia airport’s immigration control, waiting to be stamped and approved for domestic transit. Cell-phone use was prohibited, so I took to watching people. One border control officer caught my attention, as he interacted jovially with some clients, while avoiding acknowledging others. The difference seemed to lie in the client’s visible ethnicity. As luck would have it, I ended up in his line. Previous experience had shown me that, unlike Germans, Americans tended to react to my white appearance first, my “ethnic name” second. I figured I would be fine. “I see you’re connecting to Detroit? [Pause] Why would anyone go there!? You know there are some very dangerous people there.” “Um…” Before I could come up with a TSA-appropriate reply, he continued: “Do you wanna take my gun?” I giggled, taken aback. “Oh, no, that’s okay, thank you.” “You should take my gun,” he insisted, convinced by this display of femininity that I needed assistance. Again, I politely declined (quietly judging him by my European views on assault weapons). “But the people you’re staying with will have a gun, right?” “I don’t think so. They’re hippies,” I replied happily. His worrisome gaze looked me up and down, probably imagining where the inevitable bullets would strike my body. Slowly shaking his head from side to side, my naiveté clearly burdening his conscience, he decided to make one last attempt. A flick of his thumb undid the holster’s hood. “Please, just take it!” 2 Some years have passed since this first trip to Detroit, yet the memories are still fresh. Back then, I had exceptional timing. Nobody shot at me and I arrived just as harvesting season began. I spent six weeks volunteering on numerous urban farms across the city. I took ample advantage of Detroiters’ passion for explaining their city’s history and inherent value to the first-time visitor. After hours of labor in the fields in the scorching sun, I would usually leave with a bag of freshly harvested produce, new interviews, and impressions to ponder, and facing an exhaustingly long bike ride past urban pastures. Biking gave me time to observe the city’s countless paradoxes. Endless distances, burnt-out houses, an astonishingly large population of pheasants. Shaped by years of intellectual labor, my body now demanded twelve hours of sleep or more. The physical intensity of farming made me question glossy media stories that declared urban agriculture as a convenient, idyllic, fix-all idea for urban food deserts. Sitting in on a community meeting at a soup kitchen, I met a Black single mother who explained the effects of chronically underfunded public transport, working several minimum-wage jobs across the city, while also tending to her parenting duties. This began to open my eyes to the complex structural and personal realities of poverty. I awoke to toxic cultural and political simplifications that cloud poverty’s systemic causes; a haze of normative judgements by the economically overprivileged on the economically underprivileged. In a predominantly Black city, the racial connotations of such judgements were hard to miss. I noticed the imbalance between who spoke, and for whom, and who remained silent (or was silenced). Now, Gayatri Spivak’s provocative question (“Can the subaltern speak?”) made much more sense.1 “It’s all nice and well if these white people want to bike everywhere, but I simply don’t have the time or energy,” the woman said. She then explained that if she was late for a shift more than twice, she would be fired. Recognizing the privilege necessary to engage with sustainable practices embarrassed me at first. My colleagues encouraged me to push through this discomfort, disassemble the privileges of my white skin, and fundamentally question how I myself speak and for whom.
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