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"Land Use and Cool Cities"

Granholm Initiatives Link Sprawl, Racism, and Public Awareness

By Brian McKenna
October/November Issue, 2003

Part II

--- Also see Part I

Let's Review Some
Relevant History

How do you explain this world we face,
To all of the innocents we’ve brought to this place?

mm "Dream for Him," by David Crosby
mm (Crosby wrestles with how to tell
mm his young son truths about life)
mm "Looking Forward" CD,
mm Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young 1998

David Crosby's lyrics on the page cannot do justice to actually hearing the song, but they clue us into something essential. What do we tell our children about our history? It turns out that what we tell them are often the myths we tell one another. Writing in 1998, before the Bush Presidency, Crosby sings this beautiful chorus, with Graham Nash sweetly harmonizing aside, "I am uncomfortable lying to a child, feels like building a trap for something wild… feels like building a home in the sand, and expecting the ocean to let it stand."

The land use and "cool cities" debates thus far have not done a very good job of describing and explaining the world we face, in my view. In an attempt to be more forthright about Michigan's land use history, and its causes, I offer the following brief, partial, but important history.

The Conquest of Michigan began about 250 years ago as Europeans besieged the natives and colonized their land. The Anishnabeg – who'd thrived here for more than 7,000 years – were soon cast onto reserves, surrounded by hostile neighbors and "subject to intense indoctrination." Anthropologist Charles Cleland, in his definitive "Rites of Conquest, The History and Culture of Michigan’s Native Americans" (1992), concluded that the tragic "acts of ethnocide… can only be described [as] imperial aggression."

Forests fell, wetlands disappeared, and farms sprawled throughout the former Ottawa and Chippawa nations. Michigan was soon transformed into the world’s car capital as Henry Ford introduced the assembly line in 1913. But labor conditions were so wretched that workers formed the United Auto Workers and staged a famous Sit Down strike in 1937, marking their resistance. Ford hired Frederick Winslow Taylor to conduct time motion studies that better enabled management to eke out every drop of efficiency from the workers.

If the first conquest was primarily about accumulating land and raw materials, the second conquest was mostly about realizing the profits that flowed from control over labor.

Landsharks

By the late 20th century, Michigan's Big Three automakers, Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors had found a way to reconquer the land yet again, helping create a "geography of nowhere," (see James Kunstler’s excellent 1994 book of that title), a zig-zag of roads and straying developments that carved into the country, emptied cities of residents, caused congested work commutes and maimed and killed people, lots of them – there were 38,838,625 injuries and 1,170,694 car-related deaths worldwide in 1999, according to the World Health Organization. Unlike cigarette makers, car manufacturers were rarely liable.

The Big Three rose to the top tiers of the Fortune 500 marketing their privatized, highly polluting vehicles – 83.2% of Michigan workers drove alone to work according to the 2000 Census – even while they worked to undermine Michigan's public transit, which soon lay in tatters. Their success would never have been possible without the multi-billion dollar infrastructure of roads, bridges, research, education, and costly repairs, financed courtesy of Michigan and U.S. taxpayers. When Chrysler got into financial trouble in 1979-80, the U.S. government bailed them out.

And yet there was little allegiance by the automakers to the communities that gave them sustenance. In the 1989 documentary film "Roger and Me," Michael Moore depicted the desolation of Flint in the 1980s after GM pulled an estimated 30,000 jobs from the city and moved them to other areas like Mexico (where until a few years ago GM required women job applicants in Mexico to take a pregnancy test in order to avoid paying maternity benefits).

Land-use upsets and tragedies are not only tied to the prerogatives of transnational capital or a harsh state welfare system, they’re also products of local government. To promote growth and increase its tax base, Michigan’s cities and townships often extend their "urban boundaries" – their publicly paid-for water and sewer lines – and the value of the land tended to increase exponentially. Developers of many shades – industry, businesses, realtors, and even speculators – were encouraged to buy land and build. And poor farmers – 42.3 percent of Michigan farm operators worked off the farm 200 days a year or more to make ends meet in 1997 according to the 1997 U.S. Census of Agriculture – were tempted to sell their land at a huge windfall, as its value dramatically increased. To real estate moguls, those underground pipes were like “gold in them thar hills.”

Flint lost 22% of its population between 1980 and 2000, Detroit 21%, and Lansing lost almost 8.5 %. One in eight Flint homes are empty; Detroit has more than 50,000 abandoned properties. As the Tamarla Owens case in Flint demonstrates, the working class was left behind in cities, deprived of many essential services, as the tax base left for green space. Michigan would soon be known as one of the most racially segregated states in the country, with ethnic enclaves that mimicked the isolated reserves of the 19th-century Anishnabeg.

The Popular 1930s Artist Woody Guthrie on Land Use

As I was walkin', that ribbon of highway, I saw a sign there, said 'Private Property.' But on the other side, it didn't say nuthin', THAT side was made for you and me...

So wrote Woody in his popular counter anthem, This Land is Your Land, in a verse not often repeated. Woody was arguing that we all own the land. However in our capitalist system we have been socialized to accept the idea that great vistas of land, perhaps our most basic natural resource, are not ours at all. Since we feel that we have no rights over it, and since we have little say over its use, we grow estranged from it. Maybe that’s one reason people duck and cover whenever they hear that the government is trying to do something about land use.

Most people feel, correctly, that powerful interests determine most land use outcomes, not the democratic deliberation of citizens. Walmart – now the world’s most profitable corporation (and an anti-union shop to boot) – recently established the right to build a megastore in Meridian Township, outside of Lansing, winning a multi-year battle to build a 141,000-square-foot retail outlet against the will of township trustees who spent $101,500 to stop them in a losing cause.

Will the Governor’s "Cool Cities" initiative stop those kinds of corporate land grabs?

And how will the Land Use Council address Michigan's Native Americans, who continue a century's old battle with the State of Michigan over treaty rights, particularly private property disputes? In mid-September, for example, Attorney General Mike Cox went to federal court to deny five tribes access to private lands for hunting and fishing. The Detroit Free Press reported that an attorney for one of the five tribes covered by the 1836 treaty said the state's action would be "perceived as a direct threat to tribal sovereignty… the tribes are convinced these rights have survived, and they will vigorously oppose" the state's attempt to override them. The Natives legitimize a different – more communal – way of understanding the land.

Reading over the Land Use report one quickly recognizes its relative silence about car culture – one of the principle loci of sprawl. There are a few good ideas in the report about improving mass transit (though lip service is always paid to that) and creating context-sensitive road designs, but it remains to be seen how much money will go in that direction. What’s needed is not a token demonstration project or two, but a revolutionary overhaul of transportation culture… indeed, the culture in toto.

Katie Alford’s "Divorce Your Car!" (2000) provides an excellent critical guide for transforming car culture. Alford, who lives in the U.P., points to cities that have established car-free zones like Boston's Southwest Corridor, Boulder's thriving outdoor Pearl Street Mall, and the networks of car-free streets in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Tokyo which ban cars on Sundays in several shopping districts. "When people regain possession of these streets … an air of carnival prevails," she writes.

Alejandro Reuss, a board member of Bikes not Bombs, reports in the March/April 2003 Dollars and Sense that Bogotá, Columbia, a city of 7 million, held its first car-free day in 2000. Seattle became the first U.S. city to sponsor an official car-free day in 2002.

But Reuss demurs: "The reconstruction of public transportation and public space in general [is] highly unlikely… considering the trends toward privatization and co-modification rampant in contemporary capitalism."

Indeed, a basic assumption of the land use report that is that something called "sprawl" is a central causal category of social distress. There is no reflection in the report about whether "sprawl" might be a cloudy term, one that could be better understood as an epiphenomenon of the political economy and culture of capitalism. Is this a topic only allowed to be discussed, in depth, in cafes or graduate school seminar rooms?

Hip cities will not a cure make. Nor will preserved farmland. They are ingredients in a far more complex social struggle. One needs better theoretical tools to glimpse this shadowland. What we refuse to see clearly, we can hardly hope to remedy. A good place to start, in my view, is with these three books: "Natural Causes" (1998) by James O’Connor, "City of Quartz, Excavating the Future in Los Angeles" (1990) by Mike Davis, and "The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning" (2000) by Stanley Aronowitz.

This past November scholars assembled at a dynamic Midwest conference to explore these critical issues. The event was called “The Environment and the Treadmill of Production” and was held at the University of Wisconsin (Oct. 31 to Nov. 1). To learn more about the topics and speakers, see: www.drs.wisc.edu/bell/rc24/conference.htm. A key work discussed at the conference was the 1980 book, “The Environment: From Surplus to Scarcity,” by Allan Schnaiberg, Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University. Schnaiberg attended as an honorary guest. His book is still a very cool read for those seeking to better understand what our culture is up against.

It's not just book learning, but the experience of art that's needed to stir our souls and imaginations. A good place for "cool cities" advocates to begin their ruminations about Michigan’s Future is with Diego Rivera's fabulous frescoes, which are as hip and cool today as when he painted them in 1932. Diego is even in a popular Hollywood movie, "Frida." Rent it and you can witness in action the man who believed that art can help propel a people to revolutionary consciousness.

One wonders what Diego would be painting on the walls of Detroit today?

Also see Part I of this article.

Brian McKenna is a Lansing-based freelance writer.

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