experimenting kicks my ass.…what we can learn from Detroit

When I was a kid, I was captivated by Russian history and, in particular, Moscow. I vowed to go there and went there in 2011. Mind blowing. I’ve never experienced as many emotions as I did in Moscow – awe, confusion, trepidation, giddiness, frustration, disbelief. A city of extremes. The story of the breakfast eggs still makes me laugh.

Detroit has been similarly captivating. One day, I’ll go.

The story I want to tell is pretty much what I’m trying to do with everything in my life. I’ve found that the best way is to just lose your fears, follow your instincts and try things out. Sure, not everything works: if it doesn’t, make some changes and try again — that’s the whole point. Some people haven’t had a choice but to do it this way.

When our world is so uncertain, so volatile and so divided, we can and need to learn from Detroit to help our own lives and those of others.

Higher ground

Allow me a bit of nostalgic romanticising, but the musical history of Detroit is so damn rich it makes me wince:

Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Mamie Smith, Della Reese, Thad Jones, Bill Haley, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross, Supremes, Temptations, Edwin Starr, Martha Reeves, John Lee Hooker, Madonna, Was (not Was), Alice Cooper, White Stripes, Grand Funk Railroad, The Stooges, Iggy Pop, MC5, Chairman of the Board, Eminem.

Mark Binelli’s book “The Last Days of Detroit” is an intoxicating account of the decline of what was THE industrial giant — “the most modern city in the world, the city of tomorrow” — and the icon of the American Dream.

The breakdown of Detroit was equally as stunning and altogether heartbreaking. We know about Detroit’s history — its swaggering ultra-capitalism, racial segregation, entrepreneurialism, musical creativity, resilience, ruin porn — but the approach of Binelli to these volatile combinations is handled with balanced humanity. I really respect his work.

Nervous breakdown

Detroit is probably the most startling example of how technology crept up and smacked a city in its face. Its population declined from something like 1.8 million in the 1950’s to just 670,000 in 2018.

An extreme example of a city that exposed itself wholeheartedly to one industry - automobiles — and got shafted.

The industry justified its whole reason for being in Detroit based on (amongst other things — Henry Ford and Ransom Olds just happened to live there….) an abundance of manual labour (from the city itself as well as workers prepared to migrate there) and easy access to natural resources. When this evaporated with automation technology, the automobile connection to the city evaporated with it. The skills developed in that city, by that city, for that city, to welcome automobiles became redundant. The city’s infrastructure was massively skewed towards a lost industry and quickly became less useful. The people who expectantly came to the dazzling city to work left as quickly as they arrived.

A population of 1.8 million in the 1950’s to just 670,000 in 2018.

Human migration in extremis and those left behind in an empty city lose. Production sites, warehouses, homes, humans. Abandoned.

It’s a pretty dystopian landscape that portended a future of pain for a lot of people.

Adaptive re-use

So here’s a story of an experiment that was hatched from a pretty desperate situation.

Urban farms were one of the first examples of an experiment in adaptive reuse in Detroit as far back as 2008. Even BEFORE the city’s bankruptcy.

Rewind to the end of 2007, and the credit crunch is biting. Mark Covington had lost his job towards the end of 2007 and was living with his mum and grandma in the north-east of Detroit. He got sick of seeing trash being dumped on a plot near to their house and causing street flooding. So, with the help of volunteers and urban gardening organisations he started to clear away litter and trash in the immediate area. He realised that people would just dump trash on the area again once he’d cleared it, so he started a community garden that became the Georgia Street Community Collective. Mark began to think bigger than “just” a garden and this entrepreneurial, community focussed thinking has achieved remarkable things — regenerated the neighbourhood, provided local youth and unemployed people with opportunities, provided local students with mentors. In 2019, it owned around 22 parcels of land that feature a farm, a fruit orchard, a community centre, and more.

Mark’s mother Lorraine Covington has said that it has brought people together. “Before you would see a neighbour and they would just pass you by. But if we’re out there now, we get a honk every time a car passes or a wave.”

The mentoring, Mark believes, is of massive importance to getting kids to see the value in themselves, their neighbourhood and how they can influence other communities, not just in Detroit but around the world.

Georgia Street Community Collective started as an experiment to find a way to lead better lives. It was led by humans for humans.

And, through that, it has become part of a bigger study that could see this experiment legitimise urban agriculture, potentially benefitting more communities and lives.

Reinvention through experimentation

Detroit has been reinventing itself through experimentation; in this case through adaptive reuse of its infrastructure and human collectives. It is protecting and growing the assets that it has left through repurposing, reinvesting and reinventing. People are driving this.

The power of experimenting. The power of human connection.

And then Covid-19 happened.

It has hit Detroit particularly hard. Years of economic recovery from the Motor City trademark wiped out. And now many citizens and businesses face a further recovery that will be unimaginably difficult, particularly for black communities and black-owned businesses.

I fully acknowledge that I’m only scratching the surface of a hugely complex set of issues in Detroit and there are a whole bunch of economic and social factors that are hugely important and relevant.

But, Detroit’s story does give me hope that it will continue its recovery. It has to. It has experimented through necessity and desire and some things have worked, some things haven’t. But it’s resilient. It’s creative. It’s grown new skills. It’s re-ignited human connections.

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