Green City Diaries: Motorless meditations

Photo by Marvin Shaouni

(originally published 6/12/12 in Model D)

There’s something about cycling in this city.

Getting around Detroit by bike isn’t exactly new; it started, in fact, in the late 19th century, and has remained an affordable transportation option for resourceful Detroiters for decades. But as in other US cities reimagining themselves with sustainability in mind, the current moment feels, well, momentous. More widespread adoption, greater visibility, and tentative infrastructural developments have all aligned in recent years to suggest that in Detroit, cycling is on the rise and here to stay.

In our previous diary entry, we focused on people who choose to get around Detroit on foot or by bus. Some of the reasons they mentioned included getting to know their city better, the fact that these modes of transit are more social and humanizing than driving, and the regular exercise they provide. Those reasons all apply to cycling too. But urban cycling is a unique transportation experience, and with its apparent local boom, we thought it deserved an entry all to itself. Our subjects this month are three Detroiters who choose to bike the Motor City. Their stories and perspectives are distinct, but united by the shared conviction that when it comes to getting around Detroit, bicycling is often best.

Read the rest at Model D.

Allied Media Projects: Creative communications for the future

Photo by Marvin Shaouni

(originally published 5/8/12 in Model D)

It’s almost that time again: every summer since 2007, media makers (and reformers), social justice activists, radical educators and librarians, technologists, youth organizers, artists, and musicians from around the country gather in Detroit for the Allied Media Conference (AMC).

Their mission is to explore how participatory media are (and yet could be) used to create a more just and creative world. Members of this diverse and expanding "network of networks" come together to organize and strategize, and to share stories, information, and tools. They envision a future in which greater numbers of people can access and use empowering technologies to tell their own stories, and to start meaningful conversations about issues relevant to their communities.

The AMC originated in 1999 in Bowling Green, OH as the Midwest 'Zine Conference. It’s currently coordinated by Allied Media Projects (AMP), an organization that emerged out of the conference in Bowling Green and later moved it to Detroit (in part because of the city’s long history of community organizing and grassroots media production).

AMP’s small staff works out of the Furniture Factory in the Cass Corridor, in a vibrant space designed to foster interaction and collaboration. (Think pods, not cubicles.) Hosting the annual conference is the most visible work they do, but their other, lesser known and locally focused projects, Detroit Future Media (DFM) and Detroit Future Schools (DFS), are remarkable, and well worth a closer look.

Both projects are about fundamentally changing the city: "One of our goals is to transform Detroit’s economy into a media based one," Operations and Outreach Manager Adriel Thornton says. "One way to do that is through Detroit Future Media. We’re also concerned with transforming education in the city. That’s Detroit Future Schools."
Read the rest at Model D.

Green City Diaries: Walk the walk

(originally published 4/24/12 in Model D)

Francis Grunow, a northwest Detroiter who moved to New York for school and stayed a few years for work, describes a transformational moment he experienced there after college: the realization that he could get anywhere in the city he wanted to without a car. He felt, in that moment, "the distinct sense of being freer than (he’d) ever been before."

Francis is back in Detroit these days, working out of the Green Garage with New Solutions Group, a public policy consulting firm that’s concerned, in part, with improving transit in Detroit. (Read his recent Model D piece about Detroit’s transit history and potential future here.) His daily commute is a 200 or so foot walk from his home in the Canfield Lofts through the Green Alley adjacent to the Green Garage. He meets most of his clients by bicycle. While he doesn’t feel anything close to the expansive sense of transit freedom he did in New York, he does feel that "within a fairly defined area of greater downtown, I can get anywhere I want to most of the time with walking, biking, or the bus, and it’s pretty reliable."

Francis isn’t alone, and this phenomenon is worth a closer look: every day, in a city built resolutely by and for cars, people to choose to walk, take the bus, or ride a bike as a viable way of getting from here to there. As Detroit develops into a greener and more sustainable place, where cars play a smaller part in a more balanced and humanizing transit ecosystem, what can others learn from their stories?

That’s the question we’re exploring in this two-part diary entry. This month we’ll talk about taking the bus and walking, and next month we’ll look more closely at cycling.

Read the rest at Model D.

Green City Diaries: March is for scheming

Photo by Marvin Shaouni

(originally published 3/20/12 in Model D)

It’s almost growing season in Detroit.

Across the city, hundreds of farmers and gardeners who grow food in their backyard, community, market, or porch gardens are collecting seeds, turning and adding compost to their soil, and getting together to talk about what they’re planning to plant, and how, in all their varied plots.

For this month’s diary, we’ve been skimming the deep well of wisdom that exists in Detroit’s gardening and farming communities to learn more about their work. These interconnected communities have grown here for decades, and their numbers continue to multiply as more and more city dwellers come to understand and embrace the transformative power and practical value of participating in a sustainable local urban food system.

The benefits of growing one’s own food are legion. To name a few: In a country where most food travels between 1500 to 2000 miles to reach our plate, choosing to grow fruits and vegetables can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions resulting from industrial agricultural practices and long-distance transportation. Fresh produce is more nutritious, and it tastes better. And community gardening, more and more, is being understood as a powerful generator of social capital.

We talked to a small but diverse handful of gardeners and farmers to learn the reasons why they do what they do, their insights into the local resources available to support new growers, and the specific preparations they’re making for the season.

Read the rest at Model D.

Green City Diaries: Consume, compost, recycle, repeat

Photo by Marvin Shaouni

(originally published 2/14/12 in Model D)

It’s been a little over a year since Avalon International Breads started encouraging its customers to compost most of their waste, rather than throw it away. "Garbage is sooo 2010," reads the big, bold sign painted on what used to be the garbage can and what has been transformed into a jaunty compost bin. Simple but detailed instructions also adorn the large, colorful receptacle: "Compost Here: Food, Cups, Lids, Utensils, Salad & Dressing Containers, Paper, Soup Cups & Lids, Paper Bags, Deli Wraps." And then, in characteristic Avalon fashion, a big "Thank You!" and a heart.

Next to the compost bin are the recycling bins, housed in a metal and wood frame that’s been there since the bakery opened in 1997. And garbage? Well, if you really need to throw something away, there’s the "itty bitty garbage can," which sits on top of the much bigger compost bin in an arrangement that makes clear to anyone who walks in the door what Avalon’s eco-conscious values are.

The remarkable truth is that there’s hardly anything you can buy at Avalon these days that you can’t consume, compost, or recycle. According to the sign on the itty bitty garbage can, it is reserved for plastic bags, milk cartons, and the window bags that some loaves of bread come in. Co-owner Ann Perrault told me that plastic bottle tops are one other item that could be added to that list.

The folks at Avalon really don’t want you to throw their products away. They know, as environmentalists have been saying for decades, that there really is no "away," and they’re more committed than ever to minimizing their contributions to local landfills (or the incinerator).

Read the rest at Model D.

Green City Diaries: The journey begins now

Photo by Marvin Shaouni

(originally published 1/10/12 in Model D)

Detroit: green city?

It’s a little counter-intuitive, I know. We are, after all, the ignoble home of the most polluted zip code in the state and the largest trash incinerator in the country. We’re the only major city in the nation to lack city-wide curbside recycling. We unleashed the automobile and its attendant environmental woes to the world, of course, and our historic inability to build and sustain effective public transit is legendary (and continues).

I could go on, but I won’t, because we all know this story. It’s an old one.

Instead, why don’t we consider a new story? This one is about how we’re changing -- how we’re learning, day by day, to be sustainable. In some cases, this change is the result of organized efforts by committed groups with visionary leadership, producing such remarkable things as the new bike lanes in Corktown and Southwest, the Dequindre Cut, and Lafayette Greens.

But in most cases, this change is small, localized, and individualized, and it’s been happening far longer than we’ve had bike lanes. And people are noticing, as this article listing Detroit as one of the 10 emerging sustainable cities to watch makes clear. More and more, people here are choosing to live differently. They’re buying locally grown produce from farmers’ markets, for instance, and skipping the drive to the supermarket. They’re biking to work. They’re planting gardens and composting their scraps. They’re making a point to do all their holiday shopping exclusively at small businesses in the city. And, in the absence of curbside, they’re taking their recyclables to Recycle Here (and meeting like-minded neighbors in the process).

Read the rest at Model D.

Detroit: now with people in it!

Gheorghina, Chadsey High School, Detroit, Dawoud Bey, 2003, chromogenic print. Detroit Institute of Arts

(originally published 10/20/11 in Bad At Sports)

For decades, Detroit has performed a facile and impoverished symbolic role in our regional and national consciousness. You know what the city represents almost by instinct: abandonment, danger, the slow yet violent death of once-mighty American industry — the death, even, of the American city.

The proliferation of this looming, limiting symbolism has been accelerated, in the last decade, by advances in digital photography technology and online connectedness, which have made exhibiting photographers of us all. Amateurs and professionals alike come from all over to photograph Detroit’s ruins (and then share them with their social networks). These crumbling structures are astonishing, when you’re not used to them (and even, sometimes, when you are). They’re hulking, haunting, impossible, darkly transcendent. Photographed, they have real power as memento mori. A “unique glimpse into the sublime, where time seems suspended and the glory of a civilization now past has taken hold of the onlooker” motivates the taking of such pictures, according to Detroit Institute of Arts photography curator Nancy Barr.

But, of course, these photos are contentious. They typify the “predatory side of photography” that Susan Sontag wrote about in 1977 in On Photography. (“The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.”) They’re touristy, superficial, embarrassing; more to the point, they nakedly dramatize the power dynamics that sustain a society in which some people are born and live among ruins and others can swoop in, photograph them, and return to their lives of material comfort.

And they keep us cornered, these photos. “This is what you are,” they say blandly to a city that is tired of getting shit on by hostile outsiders. They come to define us, to those who don’t know our warmth and industriousness.

But things are changing. Thanks in part to the same connecting technologies and tendencies that encourage the proliferation of ruin porn, new and expanding narratives about Detroit are being successfully disseminated alongside the old ones. Yes, we’re post-industrial; yes, we’re poverty-stricken; yes, we’ve got all these decrepit buildings to deal with; yes, yes, yes.

But! There are people here. All kinds of people, in fact. People who are struggling, yes, but also people who are choosing to live differently. People who’ve lived here all their lives and people who come from far away. People who are finding new ways to support one another. They’re designing and creating viable public spaces, they’re farming the land, they’re learning to live in ways that are not inherently hierarchical, they’re making art out of the rubble. Is all this new? No. But for the first time in a long time, it’s news. In a surprising turn, the people in this city are starting to compete with violent death and empty buildings as objects of outsider interest.

Detroit Revealed, the new exhibition at the DIA that showcases ten years of Detroit photography by eight different photographers (four local, four not), reflects Detroit-as-symbol in the expected ways (“predictable,” the exhibition text readily admits), but also in some of these newly-understood ways. It’s notable because it reflects a tentative understanding of Detroit’s real urban complexity, a complexity that has lately eluded it in the popular consciousness.

Read the rest at Bad At Sports.