Foreword to Your Town Tomorrow
It has been over three hundred years since Count Ponchartrain sent word back to Paris describing Detroit’s landscape as “...so temperate, so fertile and so beautiful that it may justly be called the earthly paradise of North America.” It was Ponchartrain’s countrymen who found this land so hospitable they lay out “ribbon farms” which billowed from the river in strips up to a mile inland. It was these farms which were paved over and built upon once the industrial age came; the age of Henry Ford and his automobile. But despite the concrete and the trampling of people, the land never went away; it simply lay dormant, and given the opportunity it shows itself again. It creeps through the crevices to again exert its dominance. And people once more see it’s beauty and find a need for it’s rich soil.
The most important thing to understand about Detroit–as you see it today, with its abandoned buildings both large and small, and its empty lots, where buildings once stood, scattered about–is that half its population left. Nearly one million people, in a matter of a few decades, no longer needed the infrastructure which was built to accommodate all two million of them. Henry Miller’s prediction in his book “The Air-Conditioned Nightmare” had come true. Miller, referring to Detroit in the early 1940s wrote: “The capital of the new planet–the one, I mean, which will kill itself off–is of course Detroit. I realized that the moment I arrived.”
Detroit, at one time, produced half the world’s automobiles. Jobs were plentiful and anyone, from anywhere in the world, could come to Detroit and get one. The city evolved into the 20th century’s prime example of industrial prosperity. But, like Miller foresaw, it wouldn’t last. There are many reasons why Detroit is in the state it’s in today. These reasons have been debated and reiterated for years. But the fact of the matter is Detroit is here and it is here to stay; in whatever guise it may evolve into. Coleman A. Young, the mayor of Detroit for twenty years starting in 1973, summed it up well in his autobiography: “In the evolutionary urban order, Detroit today has always been your town tomorrow. ...Detroit remains a surpassingly purposeful place, as important to the nation right now as it has ever been– maybe more so, because right now it is telling us that the cities are in trouble. Detroit is the advance warning system–the flashing red light and siren–for what could be a catastrophic urban meltdown, and the country had damn well better pay attention.”
Thirteen years since Young wrote this the city proves to be the harbinger of which he speaks. Life in Detroit can be harsh. Those who have stayed, either by choice or, more likely, because their economic situation left them no option, have been forced to adapt while dealing with the poverty and crime which have resulted from the loss of the once plentiful jobs. It may surprise many people, however, that a place so synonymous with urbanism is actually getting more and more agrarian. The definition of what a city “is” is gradually being changed within the borders of Detroit.
-Matt Casadonte, November 2007