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On Detroit’s east side, in neighborhoods
where vacant lots and burned-out shells of former homes dominate the landscape,
a radical vision is emerging. It is a futuristic view of urban redevelopment
that draws heavily upon the past. It goes by the name Adamah (Ah-da-ma). The word has a biblical connotation, and in
Hebrew means “of the earth,” but forget about the Old Testament. This project,
an intricate master plan for more than 3,000 acres, is pure New Age. Created over the course of four months by
six architecture students and their advisers at University of Detroit Mercy,
the project envisions creating an alternative community that begins a half-mile
from downtown on the city’s near-east side, stretching from the river north to
I-94. Bounded by I-75 on the west and East Grand
Boulevard on the east, the project offers up a new way to look at development
in a city that accommodated nearly 2 million people at its peak in the 1950s
but now has fewer than half that many inhabitants. Because of that tremendous exodus,
Detroit, perhaps more than any other major city in America, has an abundance of
vacant land and abandoned property. Instead of trying to return Detroit to its
industrial glory days, Adamah’s creators and a small group of community
activists promoting it see the east side’s empty lots and forsaken buildings as
a chance to set the stage for development in the “post-industrial” age. As such, the project leans heavily on
agriculture. Plans include greenhouses for tulips and vegetables, grazing land
and a dairy, a tree farm and lumber mill, community gardens and a shrimp farm. The plans also include windmills to generate
electricity, ivy-covered freeway buffers to help clean the air, a canal for
both irrigation and recreation, even co-housing,
which can include shared dining and common areas to provide a greater sense of
community. It calls for creation of living and work spaces in such old
industrial buildings as the former Packard auto plant. Looking at the colorful, bucolic plans for
Adamah, the temptation is to call this a utopian concept, but that wouldn’t be
quite right. Utopia, by definition, is unattainable, and the people who
conceived Adamah did so with every intention of seeing some version of their
plan implemented. “When you first look at this, people say
it’s wild and crazy,” says Stephen Vogel, dean of University of Detroit Mercy’s
school of architecture. “But when you look at it closer, it’s not so wild and
crazy at all. What we are talking about doing are all very pragmatic things.” There are tremendous obstacles to overcome.
Even when pressed, Vogel is hard put to place a price tag on this sort of
massive development. But, to give some idea, he estimates that just creating the
canal that forms a crucial part of the project would cost at least $200
million. And then there’s the issue of trying to generate a green future for an
area still dealing with the toxic burden of its industrial past. Most daunting of all, perhaps, is that fact
that even though many of the individual pieces being proposed have been
pioneered elsewhere, no one has ever tried to put them all together on a scale
approaching the one being talked about here. Considering all that, the obvious question
is: Can Adamah’s proponents make the great leap needed to take the project from
concept to reality? A creek’s rebirth Like most collaborative efforts, the Adamah
project is a tapestry formed from many threads. One of those fibers stretches
back more than 20 years. In 1979, Stephen Vogel’s firm, Schervish
Vogel Consulting Architects, was performing site analysis work for a string of
parks along Detroit’s riverfront when he learned of a storm drain called Bloody
Run. He conducted some research and found it was named for a creek that had
been covered over and absorbed into the city’s sewer system around the turn of
the century. Vogel began toying with the idea of
“unearthing” the former creek, but the idea languished. As odd as it seems, the history of Bloody
Run Creek and the fallout from Detroit’s crack epidemic would eventually merge. In 1987, a year after 46 children in the
city were gunned down and another 345 were wounded from the crossfire of
battling drug gangs, some Detroit residents began taking to the streets,
marching on drug houses with bullhorns blaring. Among the leaders of the
movement known as Save Our Sons And Daughters were a pair of longtime
activists, Jimmy and Grace Lee Boggs. At the same time, Jimmy Boggs was crusading
to block Mayor Coleman Young’s efforts to bring casino gambling to Detroit.
When Young challenged his opponents to be more than naysayers, Boggs responded
with an alternative vision. “We have to begin thinking of creating small
enterprises which produce food, goods and services for the local market, that
is, for our communities and for our city,” contended Boggs in a 1988 speech.
“In order to create these new enterprises, we need a view of our city which
takes into consideration both the natural resources of our area and the
existing and potential skills and talents of Detroiters.” As the crack houses began to close, the
community, seeing the results of grassroots activism, became even more
energized. Their efforts gained added momentum
beginning in 1992, with the formation of Detroit Summer.
A sort of activist training ground for people aged 13 to 25, the program
imports volunteers who join with Detroit kids to participate in revitalization
projects, including the planting of community gardens. Those Detroit Summer gardens became part of
a patchwork of similar projects nurtured by the late Gerald Hairston, who
helped create scores of community gardens throughout the city. By the mid-’90s, with the assistance of the
Hunger Action Coalition of Michigan and Michigan Integrated Food & Farming
Systems, people from those gardens joined forces to create the Detroit
Agriculture Network, which promotes urban agriculture. Kyong Park, an internationally known
architect who frequently served as a visiting lecturer at University of Detroit
Mercy, became part of this mix. Park moved to Detroit in 1998, buying a house
on the east side and setting up the nonprofit International Center for
Urban Ecology (ICUE). The threads of Adamah were beginning to
weave together. A bottom-up approach “Because he lived in this community, Kyong
Park could feel the pulse of what was happening here,” observed Jim Embry,
director of the Boggs
Center, which was founded in 1995, two years after Jimmy Boggs’ death. Just as Boggs envisioned in his 1988 speech,
Park sees Detroit as the culmination of the industrial revolution. The city
that showed the world how to mass-produce automobiles, that served as
democracy’s arsenal during World War II, that rode a wave of labor activism to
middle-class affluence and model race relations, had fallen farther and hit
bottom harder than any other major U.S. city “In terms of urban industrialization, mass
production, the working class, and labor history, (Detroit) is the largest
factory town ever built,” observed Park in an interview last year. “Because of
the urban destruction it has gone through and which is still visibly with us,
Detroit also represents the biggest failure of the modernist city.” Dean Vogel talked with Park about Bloody Run
Creek, and how, if unearthed, it could provide a lifeline of water to a
community seeking self-sufficiency. Park, as he explains on the ICUE Web site,
wanted to “regenerate” the near-east side of Detroit into “a new model for
community development.” Both knew that any successful plan would require
community input. Therefore, in 1999, as Vogel and Park began
organizing students to conduct a block-by-block survey of the future Adamah
project site, they had the students begin by meeting with Boggs and other
activists. “We didn’t want to create this grand vision
in an ivory tower,” explained Vogel. “That won’t work. There are real things
going on in the community.” For redevelopment to work, it must be an
extension of what’s already happening. That sort of thinking stands the traditional
approach to city planning on its head. But the traditional approach, say
proponents of project Adamah, isn’t working. Which is why Grace Boggs and others say they
haven’t even considered approaching the city with their vision at this point.
The way they see it, bureaucrats and politicians would never take the lead in
pursing a concept as unorthodox as this one. The only way to make it happen,
they say, is to build community support, then start implementing their plan by
taking small steps. Billions of dollars have been invested in
Detroit over the past dozen years, said Vogel, “and the population is still
going down.” During the ’90s, while the U.S. economy was
experiencing unprecedented growth, Detroit capitalized on the surge by
directing much of its resources into big-ticket items such as a pair of new
sports stadiums and downtown development projects such as casinos. Such an approach is not bad if it is part of
a diversified plan, says Vogel. “But you can have all the stadiums you want. If
you don’t have housing, if you don’t have (livable) neighborhoods, you are not
going to have a revitalized city. “It’s great that you have a company like
Compuware coming in here. But you should be devoting equal time to making sure
that my neighborhood is not declining. And that’s not happening. Small
businesses are continuing to leave, and that’s tragic.” Grace Lee Boggs is even more emphatic in her
denouncement of the city’s approach to development. “A lot of folks in the bureaucracy know that
the approach we’ve been taking up until now has failed,” she says. “The city
can’t be rebuilt from the top down by politicians reacting to crises or by
developers seizing opportunities to make megaprofits.” According to mayoral spokesman Greg Bowens,
the city is open to exploring innovative developments such as Adamah, but even
pieces of it will go nowhere without the basic component supporters are now
trying to generate: broad community support. “To carry you through the political land
mines that can emerge, you have to do an enormous amount of outreach,” says
Bowens. “Even something that seems as benign as a massive tree farm can be
fraught with peril. Where’s it going to be? Who will pay for it? How will it be
maintained? Who will make sure it doesn’t become a dumping ground? “Just because something is unique doesn’t
always mean it is good. Particularly in regards to land use, you have to make
sure you have buy-in from the people who live in the area.” That much, at least, Grace Lee Boggs agrees
with. In her view, for development to be sustainable, it must come from the
grassroots, and be horizontal instead of vertical. She likens the evolution of
Adamah to a spider web, emerging a strand at a time, from Gerald Hairston’s
community gardens, to Stephen Vogel’s affinity for Bloody Run Creek to Kyong
Park’s ICUE, which, according to its Web site, was created to help “draw artists, architects and
students from around the world” to Detroit to work “side by side with
entrepreneurs and organizations in this community.” Urban farmers In a paper she co-wrote last year for the
Journal of the American Planning Association, Wayne State University’s Kami
Pothukuchi, contended that the time has come for planners — who have
traditionally paid scant attention to the “food system” — to begin including it
in their urban designs. But the spider web Grace Boggs sees forming
in Detroit is spreading through urban areas across the world. “It’s a fast-growing global phenomenon,” the
Christian Science Monitor reported in January. “Nearly 20 percent of the
world’s food now comes from city-based farms. Averaging anywhere from one to 20
acres in the U.S., these tiny urban farms say they offer local consumers higher
quality produce, at many times the yield per acre of bigger, industrial farms.” Michael Abelman, founder of the Center for
Urban Agriculture, made a similar observation last year in Earth Island
Journal: “There is a quiet revolution stirring in our food system. It is not
happening as much on the distant farms that still provide us with the majority
of our food: it is happening in cities, neighborhoods and towns.” Although Pothukuchi hadn’t heard of the
Adamah project, she was enthusiastic when Metro Times asked her about the
feasibility of such a large-scale urban development. “I think they have the
basis for something very real, something very powerful,” Pothukuchi said.
“There have been these elements of responsible architecture and planning since
the ‘60s.” She noted that the environmental and civil
rights movements spurred thinking about new approaches to urban planning that
were built around the concept of “sustainability,” but they seldom got the
attention they deserved. “The argument has always been that
developers were building large suburban houses because that’s what the market
wants,” she said. “But I don’t think that’s right. I think the problem has been
that people aren’t being offered enough choices.” But that’s changing. Dozens of alternative,
ecologically minded communities have sprung up across the country in recent
years. From Ann Arbor to Ithaca, N.Y., to rural areas of Virginia to Missouri
and Oregon and California, people are creating the types of cooperative
“co-housing” communities envisioned for parts of the Adamah project. Likewise, agriculture has sprung up in
blighted areas of some of the nation’s largest cities. In Philadelphia,
Greensgrow Farm produces flowers and specialty crops for upscale restaurants at
a site that once housed a galvanized steel plant. In the Watts section of Los
Angeles, a three-acre plot produces 100 kinds of organic fruits and vegetables. At Chicago’s notorious Cabrini-Green housing
project, schoolchildren raise escarole for gourmet restaurants and organic
markets. They also tend a small herd of goats, and plan to use their milk to
start making cheese. And on the city’s South Side, children are raising
earthworms and nursing tilapia fingerlings at an indoor aquaculture operation. There is, obviously, a giant chasm between
these relatively small operations and the vision for Detroit offered up by the
Adamah project. No one, however, expects the project to emerge full-blown.
Everyone involved sees it as a process. “We’re not looking for one quick fix,”
explained Dan Pitera, an Adamah adviser who is head of the Detroit
Collaborative Design Center, a nonprofit architecture firm affiliated with
University of Detroit Mercy. “This is something that will have to be done a
piece at a time.” Building momentum In fact, even the pieces of Adamah are, for
the most part, plans drawn in sand. From the perspective of people like Jason
Fligger, that’s a good thing. As the urban agriculture coordinator for the
Hunger Action Coalition, Fligger knows firsthand how difficult it is to sustain
even small operations. When he viewed a video outlining plans for Adamah, he
came away with several concerns. For example, the plan envisions a plant that
would turn corn into ethanol for fuel. Fligger, who has researched the issue,
questions how “sustainable” that is, because corn demands heavy applications of
fertilizer to maintain high yields year after year. When you factor in the energy
it takes to create fertilizer, along with the depletion of soil nutrients, and
the energy required to create the ethanol and then truck it to market, says
Fligger, you’re probably better off just growing food to eat. Likewise, something as apparently
eco-friendly as fish farming can cause environmental problems. If not properly
filtered, effluents can cause oxygen depletion in surrounding waters and
exacerbation of toxic algae blooms, according to a recent Environmental Defense
Fund report. Fligger also points out that much of the
soil in Detroit is contaminated with pollutants such as lead, and the obstacles
that can pose for anyone looking to grow food here. What’s good about these sorts of issues
being raised, say supporters, is that people are taking the project seriously
enough to give it careful thought. And that, they say, was the initial goal. The intent was not to produce a final
blueprint right out of the box, explains Pitera, but to set the stage for
debate and offer a direction in which to move. Proponents describe Adamah in its current
form not as a destination, but as a catalyst. What’s important, they say, is to
consider the possibilities. There’s already a plot at an abandoned
school site near Mt. Elliot and Canfield streets where six acres of alfalfa
grows. That, in turn, is being used to feed small animals as part of an
agriculture program at the Ferguson Academy, a school on the city’s west side. “We have extremely good soil here,” says
Kristine Hahn, a consumer horticulture agent for Michigan State University’s
cooperative extension service in Wayne County. “As long as you do some fairly
decent investigations to make sure there’s nothing toxic present, there’s no
reason you couldn’t grow just about anything.” And even if there are toxins, notes Hahn,
research suggests that certain plants can naturally detoxify soil over a few
years, greatly reducing the expense usually associated with environmental
cleanup. “We may not have all the answers right now,”
admits Pitera. “but architects are used to working through many layers of
information. Components of this plan will be discarded and others will be put
in their place. There won’t necessarily be a fish farm or urban forestry. What
we’ve done is create a plan that leads in the direction of sustainability.” As they show the video created to generate
interest in the Adamah project, Vogel, Boggs and others, such as Jim Embry,
director of the Boggs Center, say the response has been impressive. “Where we’ve shown it, people have been
profoundly affected,” said Embry, who recently returned from a trip to the
Appalachia region of Kentucky. In some cases, such as in Kentucky, the
video inspired people to re-examine the potential for economic development in
their own communities “At other times,” adds Boggs, “people see
the video and say they want to come to Detroit to help make it happen.” As for Wayne State University’s Pothukuchi,
she was ready to contact Vogel and offer her assistance. “Proposals like this really help in creating
arenas to engage in dialogue,” she said. “People are looking for ways to better
live their lives. Pothukuchi also points out that there is
grant money floating around for a variety of projects similar to those being
proposed by Adamah. Seed money from the U.S. Department of Agriculture could
provide as much as $250,000 for certain pilot projects, she said. The
Environmental Protection Agency could be interested in providing start-up
money, and private foundations she is familiar with could be mined for as much
as $1 million in some cases. “I don’t think this is a pipe dream, I don’t
think it’s pie in the sky. There are definitely parts of this that are very
practical, parts of it that can be put in place,” Pothukuchi said.” For Pitera, that sort of response is both
encouraging and a bit daunting. “We never expected this to take on such
momentum so quickly,” he said. “What we need to do now is work on the
specifics. If we don’t, this is going to fall flat.” Community input Chris Pomodoro, one of six students who
helped create the Adamah plan over a four-month period in the spring of 2000,
says the experience has changed his life. “When we went out into the community and
talked to people about the project, it was exciting,” he recalled. “You could
see that their own ideas were being sparked, that you could not only do this,
but that you could also do this and this and this. It was a way of helping
empower the people who live there, a way of providing a more powerful way of
approaching city planning. I wasn’t like some corporation coming in and saying,
‘We want to build a factory here.’” Pomodoro grew up in Farmington Hills
observing Detroit from a distance, so the survey provided a fresh view of the
city. “It was surreal,” he says. “You’d be
standing in these vacant lots, with fields of grass growing, and see pheasants
go running by, and in the distance you would see the skyline with the RenCen
standing there. “There’d be a lot of junk from dumping, and
all sorts of bad things in the area. But I also saw it as a beautiful thing.
When you look at all this vacant land and abandoned housing, Detroit is like
the land of opportunity. I could never afford to buy a building in New York or
Chicago or San Francisco.” Now a graduate with degrees in architecture
and civil engineering, Pomodoro is working at the Design Center and shopping
for property on the east side. “It’s possible to buy a building here, and
turn it into a community for artists and designers.” It’s also an opportunity to remain a part of
the project he helped start. “This is a continuing thing,” he said. “If
it starts moving to the point where projects are being done, it needs to be as
inclusive as possible, with a continuing dialogue among people in the
community. Hopefully, I’ll be one of those people soon.” To learn more about the Adamah
project, phone the Boggs Center at 313-923-0797, or visit its Web site at http://www.boggscenter.org/. Curt Guyette is Metro Times news editor. He can be reached at 313-202-8004 or cguyette@metrotimes.com. |