Motor City Green: A Century of Landscapes and Environmentalism in Detroit (History of the Urban Environment)

Motor City Green: A Century of Landscapes and Environmentalism in Detroit (History of the Urban Environment)

Winner, 2021 CCL J. B. Jackson Book Prize | Winner, 2020 Jon Gjerde Prize from the Midwestern History Association Motor City Green is a history of green spaces in metropolitan Detroit from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century that focuses on the creation and use of parks, gardens, yards, and other designed landscapes. Joseph Stanhope Cialdella argues that generations of residents and communities in the region turned to these outdoor spaces to relieve problems created by the city’s industrial rise and decline, racial segregation, and economic inequality. As Detroit continues toward a green future, Motor City Green looks to the past to demonstrate how the city’s urban gardens of today evolved from, but are also distinct from, the urban green spaces that came before them. Joseph Stanhope Cialdella’s fine book, Motor City Green , relates a surprising tale that is perhaps not so surprising. Across the 130-year rise and decline history of America’s archetypal industrial city, Detroiters―even the most economically challenged among them, immigrants and African Americans―insisted on relationships of various kinds with the natural world. ― The Michigan Historical Review Motor City Green: A Century of Landscapes and Environmentalism in Detroit is a fascinating look into Detroit’s history through the lens of environmentalism, the ‘ways in which urban residents made and gave meaning to green spaces.’ This book will appeal to a wide audience. It certainly gives a creative, factual picture of the frustrations experienced by African Americans because of governments, policies, and practices that have systematically excluded or forgotten them. . . . Cialdella shows that there is a lot of green in this rustbelt city. ― International Journal of Environmental Studies Motor City Green puts the city’s current moment in a larger context by showing that urban gardening has a long history in Detroit. Artfully drawing connections between rusty industrial spaces with lush urban green spaces, Cialdella shows readers how the two are inherently related rather than opposed. -- Catherine McNeur, Portland State University Motor City Green is the most comprehensive published history of parks or urban agriculture in Detroit. Since the historiography of urban agriculture remains relatively underdeveloped, Cialdella’s book should attract more attention to the topic within the fields of urban history and urban environmental history. -- Josiah Rector, Northland College Projects to green cities strike many as new and innovative. In this excellent book, Joseph Cialdella challenges this assumption by showing that urban environmentalism in Detroit has a long and fascinating history. Immigrant, working-class, and African-American Detroiters used nature to grow food, play, ameliorate a harsh industrial setting, build community, and reimagine urban life. -- Colin Fisher, University of San Diego Motor City Green sheds light on the ways social and political history intersect with urban and environmental history as a new way to tell the history of Detroit. Joseph Stanhope Cialdella is assistant director for experiential learning at the University of Michigan and an independent scholar. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Excerpt from Motor City Green: A Century of Landscapes and Environmentalism in Detroit by Joseph S. Cialdella From the Introduction Detroit is a surprisingly green place. When the photographer Andrew Moore came to photograph the city in 2008, he was enthralled with the ways in which nature had overtaken abandoned structures. It seemed to him “a landscape where the evidence of human endeavor was slowly being subsumed by nature.” For those outside Detroit, Moore’s images shape a familiar vision of urban decline in so-called rustbelt cities, where nature overtakes the lingering grittiness of an industrial past (see figure I.1). Photographs of weeds overtaking abandoned buildings are powerful images and have become a common genre among both professional photographers and amateurs in the digital world. They provoke a sense of disbelief for onlookers. “Detroit’s transfiguration,” writes Moore, “has led it beyond decay into a surreal landscape, where the past is receding so quickly that time itself seems to be distorted.”1 For those living in Detroit, though, the city is far from surreal, as numerous critics of these images have noted. Instead, the landscape is a daily reminder of loss and destruction.2 Detroit, of course, is not an empty urban wilderness. Despite all his tropes of wilderness and sublime nature, the landscape Moore found on his visit is anything but natural. His images are more shocking because they represent places cultivated by years of policies that instigated urban disinvestment, prioritized suburban areas, and divided the region along racial lines.