The woes of the auto industry have decimated Detroit, leaving behind miles of waste land and abandoned homes. Now one of the area’s richest men is hoping to revive the region with a farm centred in the urban environment. Katty Kay has been to meet John Hantz who hopes his $30m (£18.9m) investment will improve the neighbourhood and spur development. Watch Katty Kay talks to John Hantz here.

The city was built for two million but now has a population of only 800,00

By Katty Kay
BBC World News America, Detroit
Aug. 5, 2010

Excerpt:

John Hantz is soft spoken, meticulously polite and ferociously ambitious. For his latest plan, he has to be. This multi-millionaire, financial tycoon wants to turn destitute Detroit into the world’s largest urban farm.

Drive through Detroit and immediately you see the scale of this city’s problems. There are burnt out houses, piles of rubbish and empty lots on every block. Anyone who can seems to have fled.

The city was built for two million but now has a population of only 800,000. So 40,000 acres of Detroit now stand unused, home to weeds, broken glass, even pheasants.

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Volunteers plant a median in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle with edible landscaping. Photo by Darrin Nordahl

Food not flowers

By Darrin Nordahl
Grist
Aug 5, 2010
Darrin Nordahl is the city designer at the Davenport Design Center, a division of the Community & Economic Development Department of the City of Davenport, Iowa. He has taught in the planning program at the University of California at Berkeley and is the author of My Kind of Transit and Public Produce, which makes a case for local government involvement in shaping food policy.

Excerpt:

There’s a new breed of urban agriculture germinating throughout the country, one whose seeds come from an unlikely source.

Local government officials from Baltimore, Md., to Bainbridge Island, Wash. are plowing under the ubiquitous hydrangeas, petunias, daylilies, and turf grass around public buildings, and planting fruits and vegetables instead — as well as in underutilized spaces in our parks, plazas, street medians, and even parking lots.

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Featured in Eating Local: The Cookbook Inspired by America’s Farmers

By Dov Hirsch
Crop to Cuisine
Aug 2, 2010

Farming has long been a “country thing”. Yet more and more people are reintroducing farms in urban areas. Not gardens, but actual farms.

The people at Sur La Table have taken notice of this phenomenon. The cookware retail giant recently released its’ own Farm To Table Cookbook, entitled, Eating Local: The Cookbook Inspired by America’s Farmers. Today we get out of the studio and into the field, on one of the farms featured in this cookbook.

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