Shades of Green: Nature, Depopulation, and Urbanism in Detroit

• In Event: 1451 - Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 8. Neighborhood Change

Abstract

Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper examines how residents of Brightmoor differently related to the return of greenery in their neighborhood. Brightmoor was a depopulated, predominantly poor and black neighborhood in northwest Detroit. Nature grew lushly in Brightmoor’s vacant spaces. Wildlife thrived. Some areas resembled rolling rural fields over any place commonly imagined as urban. I show how many long-time residents hoped that Brightmoor would regain density. Many saw returning nature as a threat to urbanism, and their future hopes for the neighborhood. I show how many residents equated tall grass on their block with blighted homes, and sometimes felt overwhelmed by the lush greenery around them. Mowing the grass allowed residents to reassert their visions of place and express a sense of control. They also understood it as a way to keep violence and urban decline at bay.I contrast these practices against those of new white urban farmers, who had started to move into Brightmoor in the last decade. I show how these whites supported wildflower fields and housing demolitions without rebuilding. They envisioned depopulated Brightmoor as rural-like, with “country-like” nature. Wild deer, untrimmed trees, and tall grass fit with their visions of place, and indeed, had been part of the attraction of Brightmoor. Some kept illegal livestock in their backyards, while others sowed wildflowers on vacant lots, while trying to deter he city and fellow residents from mowing these lots. This paper shows how the ways residents managed nature in Brightmoor revealed how they imagined themselves, the neighborhood, and its future. It provides new insights into life in an extremely depopulated neighborhood, and how experiences of depopulation shaped residents’ everyday practices and visions of place. Doing so, it expands our understandings of contemporary urbanism, and of newly emerging urban inequalities in places as Detroit.

Author

• Sharon Cornelissen, Harvard University