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

本博士论文研究计画探讨底特律市的绿色重建现象。经过几十年的工业衰退、郊区化和贫困，大约10万块城市土地--底特律可用土地的三分之一--空置着。然而，在过去的几年里，规划者、活动家和城市官员提出了一些雄心勃勃而又有争议的计划，围绕农业和其他通常与农村地区相关的经济活动来重组底特律的后工业景观。这些提议包括在底特律市中心建立世界上最大的城市农场，以及种植商业森林、创建有计划的荒野区、将旧工厂改造成渔业以及扩大该市已经庞大的社区花园网络等计划。底特律并不是唯一一个做出这些努力的城市。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的对策。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影响的手段：工业衰退、贫困、有毒景观、粮食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化城市和生活在其中的人们意味着什么的理论工作或实证研究却很少。这项研究将有助于学术界对后工业城市在21世纪世纪的变化性质，特别是对经济转型，空间关系的重新定义，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，生活史和绘图，研究如何以及为什么对农业或绿色项目的废弃土地提出正式和非正式要求，这些土地要求如何在政治竞技场中谈判，构建和管理，以及群体和个人行为者对废弃土地权利的概念化和对城市未来的设想方式的差异。在城市地理学、财产理论、批判性种族研究和政治生态学的基础上，本研究着眼于底特律城市农业和土地再分配的形成和后果，并开发了一个框架，以研究其他正在经历“绿色”转型的城市的环境政治。底特律的农业转向代表了对经济发展和城市环境问题的新关注的长期争论的新参与21世纪世纪的可持续发展。底特律通过社区花园和城市农场的“绿化”吸引了媒体，研究人员和演员的大量关注，他们将城市的废弃土地视为投资和建立替代社会世界的吸引力。然而，尽管土地开发前景光明，但它提出了关于“绿色”中产阶级化以及底特律及其他地区土地和资源控制的过程和实践的重要理论和经验问题。“新底特律”对居民，特别是穷人、黑人和边缘化群体的影响，在很大程度上取决于如何主张废弃土地，以及如何在种族和经济差异中想象、谈判和制定财产权和新的所有权形式。这项研究的最终产品将包括博士论文，同行评审的学术期刊上的文章和学术贸易书籍。研究结果还将在学术会议上与底特律的合作者和社区广泛分享，并通过在公共媒体上发布研究的非技术描述。

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.