The city of Detroit in the United States has a lot of vacant space – as much as a quarter of residential, commercial and industrial sites lie unused today. In this programme Ruth Alexander meets the people who are growing food in their neighbourhoods, creating urban farms and community gardens where houses once stood. Mark Covington is the founder of Georgia Street Community Collective, and Tyson Gersh is the co-founder of the Michigan Urban Farming Initiative. Ruth learns why so much land stands empty from the city’s official historian Jamon Jordan. Jamon explains the role of the automobile industry in bringing jobs and people to Detroit in the early 1900s, and the circumstances that led to decades of population decline, job losses and debt for the city government, culminating in bankruptcy in 2013. Tepfirah Rushdan is the newly appointed, first Director of Urban Agriculture for the city of Detroit. She explains how she hopes to bring urban farmers and politicians together to find a way for food to be grown alongside new developments as investment returns to the city. If you’d like to contact the programme you can email thefoodchain@bbc.co.uk Presented by Ruth Alexander. Produced by Beatrice Pickup. (Image: the Michigan Urban Farming Initiative a farm in downtown Detroit, surrounded by roads and buildings. Credit: Michelle and Chris Gerard/BBC)
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What happens when a city goes bust and more than half the population has left?
There was this kind of eerie aura to it.
A quarter of the lands unoccupied, there's glass everywhere.
It's scary.
I've learned that, you know, you can't wait on city government to come and do everything for you.
Some stuff you gotta do yourself.
This is the food chain from the BBC World Service.
With me, Ruth Alexander.