Author(s): Tithi Sanyal
The increasing asynchronous transformations within postindustrial shrinking cities, in relation to social, ecological, and spatial planning, highlight the need for a heuristic interdisciplinary approach. This requires studying the contextual narratives driving these transformations before engaging in urban design and policy solutions. Actor-Network Theory (ANT), while situated in Sociology, provides a unique interdisciplinary approach for studying relational entities, systems, and structures within cities. It prompts Urban Design to shift from a practice of synthesis to one of interrogation. This paper explores ANT in relation to urban design by developing a methodology to contextualize and analyze the actor-networks that are reshaping the City of Detroit’s identity from a post-industrial city to an Agrarian City. Detroit serves as an ideal case study due to the widespread adoption of agroecology, “the science, practice, and movement” of sustainable agriculture in the city, as evidenced by over 2,280 networked urban cultivation projects.¹ These land-based projects are enabled by initiatives and policies like the Urban Agriculture Ordinance (2013) and the Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund (2019) that support food security, land rights, and self-determination, particularly within African American communities. These efforts combine top-down and bottom-up responses to Detroit’s history of deindustrialization, depopulation, racial segregation, and economic decline, while addressing issues of food insecurity and environmental injustice. This paper investigates how actants interact and what outcomes emerge from these relationships. To do this, it applies the principles of ANT to examine Detroit’s agroecological apparatus, focusing on actor-networks, intermediaries, mediators, and their respective agendas within the history of urban agriculture as it intersects with urban planning and governance since the economic depression of 1893–97. It examines the dynamics between grassroots food planning initiatives and public institutional efforts. Through this lens, it reviews how these parallel forces shape the design and planning of a post-industrial shrinking city and identifies latent potentials for future urban design and policy.
Volume Editors
Reed Kroloff & Francisco J. Rodríguez-Suárez
ISBN
978-1-944214-52-4