MOTOR CITY GREEN: A Century of Landscapes and Environmentalism in Detroit

In Motor City Green, author Joseph S. Cialdella takes readers on a fascinating tour through time and space of the numerous and diverse attempts to reconcile interests in nature and the pressures of development in the iconic American industrial, and now postindustrial, city of Detroit, Michigan. With a historian’s attention to archival sources and an interdisciplinary approach nurtured in his American studies doctoral research, Cialdella hones in on the dynamic political ecology apparent in each of the major phases of Detroit’s economic and political development. This is a rewarding read for those undergraduate and graduate students, and scholars interested in Detroit’s history, community leadership, revitalization efforts, and the city’s relationship to its physical environment, metropolitan region, and national context, all of which speaks to important themes around how environmentalism in the United States intersects with its versions of urbanism. The stated objective of the book is to set “urban gardening and agriculture into conversation with more widely studied topics in cultural and social history such as park building, city planning, and the politics of metropolitan development” (p. 10). Official public greening efforts, such as the creation of Belle Isle Park, for which the city contracted with Frederick Law Olmsted, or Mayor Coleman Young’s Farm-a-Lot program that started in the 1970s, are set alongside community initiatives, like the Detroit Urban League’s “Clean Up and Paint Up” campaign in the early years of the Great Migration and the recent work of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, to explore the conflicts around place, race, class, and power that shaped and are shaping Detroit’s milieu. The chronologically arranged case studies are framed by a concise and engaging introductory chapter entitled “Greening Detroit’s History” that could serve as a stand-alone case study in an undergraduate course, because it grapples, in a balanced way, with the many dichotomies represented by Detroit: community and industrial development, rust and green, desperation and inspiration, and ultimately decay and hope. One of the books strengths is to show how space in the city “took on different visions, forms, and meanings for different groups of people” (p. 10). Readers will learn about the wide range of historical figures, interest groups, and neighborhood organizations, particularly in the African-American areas of the East Side, the West Side, and Eight Mile Wyoming, that have been explicitly engaged in work at the intersection of urban development and the environment. The community work, at times, complimented the agenda of the city’s White leadership, however there have also been