Detroit Rewilding

CBC's The National is running a series called "Red, White, and the Economic Blues" this week. Monday's segment is called "Detroit Blues." You can view it here.

Only 800 000 people live in Detroit. The city used to be home to 2 million. But then the cycle of deindustrialization, white flight, discrimination, and building dereliction Mike Davis alludes to in "Dead Cities: A Natural History" began, leaving as much as 40% of Detroit's downtown abandoned. 120 square kilometres of what was once prime real estate in a booming city have been abandoned. That's an area bigger than Vancouver.

Today, one man survives by trapping raccoons. In the inner districts of a major American city. He lives off and sells their meat. Coyotes and packs of feral dogs roam empty streets, and pheasants hide in the fields where Eastern European immigrants used to rent houses.

Across from an all-but-abandoned power plant, a beaver has set up shop, felling trees and rerouting waterways. A beaver in the city: this was cause for excitement in Detroit. It was the first sighting of a beaver in the Motor City in 75 years. A sign of renewal, if not of the economic sort that would bring prosperity back.

It's heartening, from an ecological perspective, that nature can overcome the flattening, paving, and whitewashing we do when we build a city. Perhaps in fifty or a hundred years Detroit..ians (?) will be happy to have so much reclaimed parkland. In the mean time, I can't imagine what it's like to have such a huge chunk of your city dying away. It would be like every house in Mill Woods standing derelict. It would be like all Mill Woods and Clareview lying fallow.

I've known about the ghettoization of Detroit for a long time, but I never tried to picture it. Thinking about the extent of the decay makes me wonder how things could have gotten so bad in Detroit. It makes me think about how easy it would be for Edmonton to become urban prairie. Lose the oil sands. Watch the price of gasoline skyrocket. Reopen the Muni. Watch the Ghermezian brothers haul WEM to Calgary. Reduce tax transfers to municipalities. All it takes is a little citizen apathy, some economic misfortune, and some malevolent governments turning a blind eye. (Payback for voting Liberal, probably.)

Scary for people in the short term. In the long run, maybe an opportunity to re-vision the city. And I think we can all agree that's not a bad thing.