Detroit is empty. It is black and violent, poor and foreclosed—a gutted out postindustrial wasteland. Dilapidated houses and hollowed out factory yards serve as rotting corpses strewn across the landscape, bearing testimony to an industrial apocalypse. Such is the contemporary popular imagination of a city once known as the Paris of the West, famous in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for its Gilded Age architecture. Detroit gained its earlier fame as a major transportation and manufacturing hub in the late 19th century coach and shipbuilding industries. It rose to greater prominence after Henry Ford opened his first automobile manufacturing plant in 1899. Chrysler, Packard, Dodge and Durant all followed suit, turning the Paris of the West into Motor Town. With the new industry came new people. European immigrants and southern blacks poured into Detroit to take up positions on the assembly lines, filling out the city to a peak population of more than 1.5 million in the 1930s.

By the 1950s, Detroit began a slow decline as consolidation in the automobile industry, suburbanization and white flight initiated the exodus of jobs and people from Motown. Unemployment, poverty, crime, violence and drug use escalated in direct relation to the outflow of wealth. This slow bleeding of Detroit has continued to the present moment with the population now hovering around 900,000 and an estimated ten thousand people still leaving the city every year.

There is, however, another history to Detroit that has served as a source of hope and inspiration, a history of activism, struggle and social movements. Detroit is home to the United Auto Workers, one of the first unions to organize African American workers in the 1930s and to drive forward the unionization of US auto workers with the famous Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1936-1937. It is home to Grace Lee Boggs, a long-time feminist and anti-racism activist who worked with her husband James Boggs to establish Detroit Summer, a multi-racial and inter-generational collective working to empower Detroit youth and rebuild the city from the grassroots.

Local Food Activism in Detroit

Within the contemporary food movement, Detroit is well known as an an important site of food justice activism. In a city in which 500,000 out of 900,000 citizens are food insecure, a multitude of grassroots projects have emerged to rebuild Detroit into a sustainable urban environment for the future. Among the larger organizations that are making this transition possible is the Garden Resource Program Collaborative (GRPC), which has created a network of more than 185 organizations working urban farms within Detroit. GRPC builds the Detroit food movement by providing these organizations with seeds, educational resources and networking opportunities. The Greening of Detroit, originally established to reforest Detroit, is now the home to GRPC. In an effort to support the urban farms and gardens emerging across the city to distribute and sell their produce, this organization has also established a network of small neighborhood farmers markets.

Earthworks Urban Farm connects food justice and environmentalism by teaching farming in Detroit as an act of human participation in the natural economy. Urban Farming, an organization that began in Detroit and spread to over thirty cities across the US, works with communities to build urban farms on unused public land, and goes further to connect those communities with youth programs, health services and green collar job opportunities. Finally, Detroit Community Grocery Store Coalition is building a network of locally-owned grocery stores that redevelop Detroit by bringing an end to local food deserts and by creating job opportunities for Detroit residents.

The US Social Forum

What better place to host the second US Social Forum (USSF) than Detroit? This is exactly what the planning committee of the USSF thought when it selected Detroit as the host city, and recognized it as a “solution city” that is building on its history of solutions to rebuild the city for a sustainable future. Yesterday I dialed in and listened to one of the USSF call-in information sessions being held this month in Spanish and English. Here is what I learned:

The USSF is an outgrowth of the World Social Forum (WSF), an open space (meaning not controlled by the political, economic or social agenda of any single group) for coalition building among grassroots social movements and activists across the world. The forum is a “movement among movements,” serving as a convergence point for grassroots activists fighting against the social and economic injustices created across the world by governments and corporations that embrace neoliberal economic principles. The first WSF took place in 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, inspired by the 1999 “Battle of Seattle” in which grassroots activists from across the world held massive protest against the WTO Ministerial Conference of 1999, which sought to shape a new round of global trade negotiations to usher in the new millennium. Like the Battle for Seattle protests, the WSF emerged in 2001 as a counter-mobilization to neoliberalism and globalization. This time it was in direct protest of the World Economic Forum, a meeting of government and business leaders from across the world to strategize on ways to address the social, economic and environmental problems of the world. Resisting the top-down and neoliberal-based solutions proposed by the World Economic Forum, the first WSF offered an alternative space for a more democratic and community based approach to building a better future. Now in its tenth year, the 2010 WSF is being held as a permanent year-long process that will take place through a series of events across the world.

The 2010 US Social Forum (USSF) is one of those events. The first US social forum grew out the rising awareness among WSF participants of the need to hold the US accountable for the economic degradation it reaps across the world. It also grew out of the question of just how US citizens would take up this task. In response, the first USSF took place in Atlanta in 2007, drawing together over 20,000 grassroots activists, mainly people of color, who came bearing testimony to social and economic crises occurring within communities across the United States.

This year’s forum will focus on two goals. The first is to take up the most urgent social and political problems facing the country and the world: the economic crisis, the failure of neoliberalism, the devastation caused by disinvestment in social welfare and in communities, healthcare, immigration, the ecological crisis, the rising right-wing movements in the US, militarization, war resistance, indigenous sovereignty, LGBT rights, and the question of holding the US accountable at a global level. These problems will be taken up through a series of workshops that will serve as the spaces for exchanging information, shaping strategies of resistance and building coalitions. Proposals for workshops can be made by registered organizations by March 20, though there is a good chance that this deadline will be extended.

The second goal of the forum is bring some much needed focus on Detroit, one of the cities most negatively affected by the current economic crisis. Workshops on the second day (June 23) of the forum will focus on connecting Detroit to the rest of the country. This will give participants from outside a chance to understand and connect with what is happening in Detroit, and allow Detroit to connect with grassroots movements outside of the city. Participants of the USSF are being encouraged to come to Detroit with the intention to give back to the city for hosting the forum by supporting local social movements. Throughout the forum there will be a chance to get involved in grassroots projects to build gardens, repair houses, paint murals, and take part in locally organized protest marches. You can also bring a book to help build a new library, or bring a bike to help create an alternative transportation system.

The forum will take place over a five-day period. The first day (June 22) will be dedicated to opening ceremonies and a march. Workshops will then take place over the next three days with a focus on problems in the US and how they intersect with the problems in Detroit (June 23), the financial crisis and how to connect the US with the rest of the world (June 24), and solutions (June 25). The final day (June 26) will take the form of a gathering of Peoples Movement Assemblies (PMAs) working towards synthesis, resolution, and planning for future actions.

By closing the forum with the Peoples Movement Assemblies, the organizing committee hopes to emphasize the grassroots basis and coalition-building function of the forum. Participants are encouraged to start participating in the forum process today by organizing PMAs within their communities. The assemblies are gatherings of people and organizations that come together to analyze the problems that plague their communities, come up with visions for change, and make commitments to take action. The assemblies, which can be organized by place or by issue, are meant to build and expand grassroots efforts for change by people and for people. By then converging in Detroit, PMAs can connect with other groups from across the country fighting similar struggles to share information, inspiration and strategies for change. After the forum, the PMAs can return to their communities armed with new strategies for action and an organization that can serve as the basis for building change.

How to Get Involved

If you are interested in participating in the USSF, there are a variety or resources available at USSF2010.org where you can search for upcoming PMA activities in your area, or download a kit for starting a new PMA. You can also find information on registering for the USSF and getting involved with forum organizing efforts. There is also a useful guide for getting to the USSF at YES! Magazine.

For food movement activists there are great opportunities to connect with the local Detroit food movement by participating in the Food Justice Work Brigade. This brigade will work with Agriculture Network, East Michigan Environmental Action Council, and community residents to construct the ponds and greenhouses that will house pollution free fish and grow fresh organic greens for local residents. It will also assist community gardens across the city in need of volunteers to prepare soil and plant crops. Finally, it will provide volunteers to help construct a series of outdoor classrooms to be used in the summer by students as learning, art, play and food growing spaces. Food justice activists from across the country can also expect to join in discussion on the critical issues of food security, agriculture and small farms, all of which are themes that will be taken up by Climate Justice workshops held during the forum. And, perhaps more importantly, people and organizations concerned with food justice issues can gain a critical opportunity to bridge their voices and concerns with those of other movements.

So, see you in Detroit?

Cross-posted at www.Integral-Living.com and at La Vida Locavore.