Doctoral Dissertation Research: Urban Farming and the Politics of Abandoned Land in Detroit

这篇博士论文研究项目考察了底特律市的绿色再开发现象。在经历了数十年的工业衰落、郊区化和贫困之后，大约10万个城市地块--底特律三分之一的可用土地--处于空置状态。然而，在过去的几年里，规划者、活动家和市政府官员提出了许多雄心勃勃且有争议的计划，以重组底特律围绕农业和其他通常与农村地区相关的经济活动的后工业景观。提议的范围从在底特律市中心建立世界上最大的城市农场，到包括种植商业森林、创建规划的荒野地带、将旧工厂变成渔业，以及扩大城市本已庞大的社区花园网络的计划。在这些努力中，底特律并不孤单。在世界各地，环境和经济危机正在重塑城市化进程和应对城市经济衰退。许多城市开始尝试“绿色城市主义”或农业发展，以此作为缓解一系列常见问题的影响的手段：工业衰退、贫困、有毒景观、食品不安全以及种族和民族歧视。然而，关于新的城市农业前沿或新的绿色发展战略对后工业城市及其居民意味着什么的理论工作或实证研究很少。这项研究将有助于研究21世纪后工业城市性质的变化，特别关注经济转型、空间关系的重新定义和种族不平等。使用定性的混合方法收集数据，包括半结构化访谈、参与者观察、文件分析、生活史和地图绘制，该研究调查了为农业或绿色项目而对废弃土地提出正式和非正式主张的方式和原因，这些土地主张是如何在政治舞台上谈判、建造和管理的，以及群体和个人行为者对其被遗弃土地的权利和对城市未来的展望方式的差异。这项研究建立在城市地理学、财产理论、关键种族研究和政治生态学的学术基础上，着眼于底特律城市农业和土地再分配的形成和后果，并建立了一个框架，研究其他正在经历绿色转型的城市的环境政治。底特律的农业转向代表着对经济发展的长期辩论和对21世纪城市环境可持续发展的新关注。底特律通过社区花园和城市农场的绿化吸引了媒体、研究人员和演员的相当大关注，他们将底特律的废弃土地视为有吸引力的投资和建立另类社交世界的场所。然而，尽管农业发展前景看好，但它提出了一些重要的理论和经验问题，涉及“绿色”士绅化以及底特律及其他地区土地和资源控制的过程和实践。“新底特律”对居民的影响，特别是对穷人、黑人和边缘化人群的影响，在很大程度上取决于废弃土地是如何被认领的，以及财产权和新的所有权形式是如何跨越种族和经济差异而被想象、谈判和颁布的。这项研究的最终成果将包括一篇博士论文，同行评议的学术期刊上的文章，以及一本学术贸易书籍。这些发现还将在底特律的合作者和社区中广泛分享，在学术会议上，并通过在公共媒体上发布对该研究的非技术性描述。

This doctoral dissertation research project examines the phenomena of green redevelopment in the City of Detroit. Approximately 100,000 urban lots - one-third of Detroit's available land - lie vacant after decades of industrial decline, suburbanization, and poverty. Over the last few years, however, planners, activists, and city officials have proposed a number of ambitious and controversial plans to reorganize Detroit's post-industrial landscapes around farming and other economic activities typically associated with rural areas. Proposals range from establishing the world's largest urban farm in the center of Detroit to schemes that include planting commercial forests, creating planned wilderness zones, turning old factories into fisheries, and expanding the city's already vast network of community gardens. Detroit is not alone in these efforts. Around the world, environmental and economic crises are reshaping processes of urbanization and responses to urban economic decline. Many cities are beginning to experiment with 'green urbanism' or agrarian development as a means of alleviating the effects of a common set of problems: industrial decline, poverty, toxic landscapes, food insecurity, and racial and ethnic discrimination. However, there has been little theoretical work or empirical research on new urban agricultural frontiers or what new green development strategies mean for post-industrial cities and the people who live in them. This study will contribute to scholarship on the changing nature of post-industrial cities in the twenty-first century with a particular focus on economic transformation, redefinitions of spatial relations, and racial inequality. Using a qualitative, mixed-method approach to data collection, including semi-structured interviews, participant observation, document analysis, life histories, and mapping, the research examines how and why formal and informal claims to abandoned land for agrarian or green projects are being made, how these land claims are negotiated, constructed, and governed in the political arena, and the differences in the ways groups and individual actors conceptualize their rights to abandoned land and envision the city's future. Building on scholarship from urban geography, property theory, critical race studies, and political ecology, this study looks at the formation and consequences of urban farming and land redistribution in Detroit and develops a framework to study environmental politics in other cities undergoing 'green' transformations.Detroit's agrarian turn represents a new engagement with longstanding debates over economic development and emerging concerns over urban environmental sustainability in the 21st century. The 'greening' of Detroit through community gardens and urban farms has attracted considerable attention from the media, researchers, and actors who see the city's abandoned lands as attractive grounds for investment and for building alternative social worlds. Yet, for all its promise, agrarian development raises important theoretical and empirical questions about 'green' gentrification and the processes and practices of land and resource control in Detroit and beyond. The implications of a 'new Detroit' for residents, especially the poor, black, and marginalized, depend in large part on how abandoned land is claimed and how property rights and new forms of ownership are imagined, negotiated, and enacted across racial and economic difference. The final products of this research will include a doctoral dissertation, articles in peer-reviewed academic journals, and an academic trade book. The findings will also be shared broadly with collaborators and communities in Detroit, at academic conferences, and by publishing non-technical descriptions of the research in public media.