[lbo-talk] Harper's Detroit article

[Mr. WD]

Has anyone read Rebecca Solnit's article on Detroit in the July
Harper's?  (Sorry, there's no electronic copy on the Internet yet).  I
just finished it and it left me pretty excited.  Roughly 3/4 of the
article is devoted to describing Detroit ("The city, once the fourth
largest in the country, is now so depopulated that some stretches
resemble the outlying farmland and others are altogether wild.") and
its history.

The final part of the article discusses how the Marxist community
organizers Jimmy and Grace Boggs developed an alternative economic
vision for Detroit in the late 80s -- basically a local economy where
many goods and services are produced locally.  In practice, this means
using the city's abandoned lots to grow food.  Apparently, this
experiment in "utopian post-urbanism" is starting to take off, and the
article cites a handful of examples.  Solnit compares what's going on
in Detroit to  Cuba's mobilization to replace mechanized agriculture
with garden agriculture after the Soviet Union collapsed.

Any Detroiters who can tell us whether this is just a bunch of naive,
pie in the sky bullshit, or did Jimmy and Grace Boggs establish the
foundation for something really exciting?  And if this is the real
deal, then where can one turn to learn more?

-WD

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