Gardens in the Machine: Cultural and Environmental Change in Detroit, 1879 - 2010.

Abstract

This dissertation argues that parks, gardens, yards, and other landscapes created by residents and city leaders are crucially important to understanding the history of metropolitan Detroit, Michigan between 1879 and 2010. The project examines how residents and city leaders negotiated social boundaries such as race and class by remaking the landscape to create a more hospitable sense of place in an overwhelmingly industrial region and endowing it with environmental values, which continue to affect the city and larger region today. Each chapter focuses on different iterations of Detroit’s landscape at various scales and proximity to the central city, such as Belle Isle Park and Pingree’s Potato Patches, to African American yards, an outdoor camp called Green Pastures, metropolitan parks, community gardens, and photographs of the city’s post-industrial decline. These case studies reveal how varied strands of environmental thought changed over time, were made tangible on the landscape, and were adapted to meet the circumstances of different generations of people in the city. Used to instill social order or contest it, reconcile the inequalities of industrial capitalism, or imagine a middle class way of life, Detroit’s cultural landscape was a dynamic terrain that residents of the region utilized to change the land and themselves. By looking for the meaning of nature in the crucible of American industry and urban decline, this dissertation demonstrates that we can trace the roots of American environmentalism not only to a distant wilderness, but also to complex spaces on the peripheries of urban life. The gardens in the machine of industrial capitalism were where residents and city leaders invented, contested, and defined ideas and ideals about urbanism, nature, and each other through outdoor spaces.