Imagining a city

The reality of any city, but perhaps Detroit in particular, is profoundly reliant on fossil fuels.  It is all cars and trucks.  It is people in boxes made of concrete, brick and glass.  The boxes are lit, cooled and heated by fossil fuels and inside the work involves consuming resources from elsewhere and transforming them.  There are lots of environmental reasons to want to change this reality, but I think the psychic reasons are more compelling.

Thursday this past week we were planting trees in a neighborhood called Cody/Rouge with the Green Infrastructure department at Greening.  There are lots of good environmental reasons to want to plant trees.  In this particular neighborhood we were actually there under contract from the Water Treatment people because that area is very low lying and when it rains there is so much runoff that goes into the storm drain area that it causes the water treatment facilities to overflow, forcing them to send some untreated sewage water into the river system.  Thousands of street trees will help to fix that.

More compelling than all that though is how excited people in the neighborhood (for the most part) were to see some trees going in.  The neighborhood isn't real burnt out, but about one house per block there is abandoned.  The folks in the neighborhood that day wanted to talk to us, to find out what sort of tree they were getting and the ones that were home also wanted to talk to us about their yards and what else is going on there.  One guy said "I think that tree is supposed to have pink flower.  That'll be nice, think it will attract the ladies?"  That same guy brought us ice cream a little later.

Yesterday I was part of a great big bike ride called the Tour de Troit.  Most of the riders I talked to were from the suburbs or other nearby areas.  Some of those were folks who worked in the city but lived outside.  The folks who hadn't been there (or biked there) in the past few months were impressed with all the bike lanes that had recently been painted in the city.  The ride was not a race and most folks were just wearing ordinary athletic clothes and riding ordinary bikes.  Even so, the sight of thousands of bikers riding down the streets of Detroit, even when we were blocking their way, seemed to make most people we passed really happy.  Lots waved or had brought their kids out to watch.  Many expressed a desire to join in if they had their bike around.  And in general that has been my experience of biking in the motor city.  People just think it is cool that you are biking and they want to chat.  Meeting folks is one of the best things about biking here, I'd never have as many interesting conversations if I was locked up in steel and glass.