I will start off with a short list of some Major US chain stores that are NOT in Detroit.
Walmart, Target, Kroger, Meijer, Safeway, Best Buy, JC Penny, Sears, Home Depot, etc etc
This is extremely unique of any major US city. Though big box stores have been generally taking over cities in the US and Canada and driving out the little guy, Detroit's entire lack of almost any major us shopping centre, weather it is a supermarket or department store is creating problems.
http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070705/METRO/707050349
As mentioned in the article above some Detroit residents state "You can't buy quality food in the city anymore." This is a HUGE problem for the people living in Detroit. To do almost any shopping, one needs to leave the city.
Through discussions with friends of mine, some of which live in Detroit and others who work and live in the suburbs, I started thinking about how this may be the start of a good thing.
I agree with the fact that Detroit needs to build itself up again with quality neighborhood supermarkets, hardware stores, clothing retailers, and all types of independent businesses. My question is, what type of a strategic plan would be needed to accomplish this task? I don't think that a Utopian society would result, because every city has its problems. I found an article on Utopian communities and the term covers a range of definitions.
ReplyDeleteUtopian Communities
Although they date to the earliest days of U.S. history, Utopian communities, intentional communities created to perfect American society, had become institutionalized in American thought by the 1840s. Various groups, struggling under the pressures of urbanization and industrialization, challenged the traditional norms and social conservatism of American society. Their desire to create a perfect world often lay in sharp contradiction to the world in which they lived, one in which capitalism, the Industrial Revolution, immigration, and the tension between the individual and the community challenged older forms of living.
The first American Utopias grew out of Robert Owen's attempt to create a model company town in New Lanark, Scotland. In the United States, Owen organized the New Harmony Community along the Wabash River in western Indiana in 1825. There the residents established a socialist community in which everyone was to share equally in labor and profit. Just months after the creation of a constitution in January 1826, the thousand residents at New Harmony divided into sub-communities that then disintegrated into chaos. In 1825 Francis Wright established another Owenite community at Nashoba in Tennessee. Wright had hoped to demonstrate that free labor was more economical than slavery, but Nashoba attracted few settlers, and the community closed its doors within a year.
Transcendentalist Influence
Transcendentalists of the 1840s believed that the true path lay in the perfection of the individual, instead of reform of the larger society. The individualistic quality of Transcendentalism gave it a more spiritual than social quality, one that also influenced later Utopian movements. Many of the figures of transcendentalism embraced the liberating qualities of Individualism, making man free of the social, religious, and family restrictions of the past. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, rejected the decaying Puritan lifestyle of New England's past in favor of the Romantic world of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. For transcendentalists, a higher reality lay behind that afforded by the senses; a reality in which people could understand truth and eternity. To reach that world, humankind had to transcend the concrete world of the senses in favor of a more mystical definition of nature. To escape the modern world, transcendentalists fled into model Utopian communities.
The most important of these communities was Brook Farm, established in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1841. Residents hoped to free themselves from the competition of the capitalist world so as to work as little as possible, all the while enjoying the fruits of high culture. Unlike their European counterparts, American transcendentalists embraced the quest for a higher moral law. Far from a simple rejection of American society, the creators of Brook Farm, chiefamong them George Ripley, a Unitarian minister from Boston, wanted to create an alternative to the capitalist state, to found a new "city on a hill." The life of the mind that the transcendentalists so valued was one of the most important components of life at Brook Farm. Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Dial editor Margaret Fuller all made regular visits. While the cultural life of Brook Farm blossomed, management of its practical matters languished. Ripley's decision to recruit more farmers over thinkers eventually alienated even Emerson. After a serious fire in 1846, the farm was sold in 1847 and the society dissolved.
Not long after the failure of Brook Farm, another transcendentalist community was established at Fruit-lands, Massachusetts. The residents of Fruitlands, originally organized in 1843 by Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane, rejected the market economy and chose a life of subsistence agriculture. But Fruitlands attracted the eccentric more than the genuinely alienated, including a number of "body purists"—one of whom advocated nude moonbathing. As a group, they rejected clothing made of cotton (as it was manufactured by slave labor) and that made of wool (as it was taken from sheep without their consent), as well as root vegetables and all animal food products in favor of fruit and corn meal. As in later Utopian experiments, women failed to enjoy the full benefits of the cooperative society. Instead, as Abigail Alcott noted, women did most of the work while the men passed the day in deep conversation. The colony lasted only through the end of 1844 and was eventually sold at auction, with Lane jailed for nonpayment of taxes.
As Brook Farm and Fruitlands dissolved, converts to the ideas of Charles Fourier in the United States grew to take the place of the transcendentalists. Fourierists believed that small, highly organized communities (or phalanxes) would allow residents to perfectly develop their talents and inclinations, free from the influence of traditional capitalist society. The standard phalanx consisted of 1,620 people living in common dwellings and working in their natural trades. In America, Arthur Brisbane became the chiefadvocate of phalanxes, hoping that they would complete what, to him, was the unfinished Revolution of 1776 by ending wage slavery. By the 1840s, Brisbane and his disciples had founded more than one hundred phalanxes across the country, from New York to Texas. Although most of these communities failed in short order, their existence underscored the general dissatisfaction some workers felt with industrialization and the triumph of the capitalist order.
Other mid-nineteenth century Utopian experiments found some success by organizing themselves around a religious principle or charismatic leader. The Shakers, whose origins dated to the visions of Ann Lee Stanley during the American Revolution, believed that mankind suffered due to the lust of Adam and Eve. Mother Ann favored celibacy as the path to perfection. She and a small group of followers founded a church outside of Albany, New York, in 1774, where they became known as "Shaking Quakers," or Shakers. They withdrew into isolated communities where they could escape from the larger society's wicked nature. They abolished not only property but marriage, demanding a strict commitment to celibacy. By the 1840s, more than twenty Shaker communities had been established in greater New England. Due to their strict rejection of marriage and a reduced number of available converts, the Shaker movement slipped into decline by midcentury and never recovered.
source: www.nps.gov/history/nr/travel/amana/utopia.htm
I agree that DET has crime problems, but that needs to be fixed before any plan for a revival of the city can be initiated. As for my reference to a utopian community i was using it in its purist form "an ideal community" no delusions of a perfect society.
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