Describe the critical need your solution addresses.

Food insecurity, high unemployment, poverty, vacant land and fragmented neighborhoods act as barriers to opportunity. These critical issues face post-industrial cities like Detroit. GrowTown provides the framework and support to build enabling spaces and connections that make the growth of dynamic and sustainable communities possible, from the ground up.

Explain your initiative in more depth and its stage of development.

Cities like Detroit are rich in land and infrastructure, but poor in capital. Urban farmers, activists, entrepreneurs, and innovators are scattered over a vast landscape. GrowTown offers a ToolBox of low-cost, adaptable solutions to harness positive community energy into distinctive centers of growing community.
Food is the jumping off point for revitalizing neighborhoods from the ground up. The Local Food Economy and its marketplace is the natural focus for civic engagement and activities that cultivate relationships and connections necessary to build successful social and economic networks.
Our systems-oriented approach uses thoughtful design at multiple levels, from grassroots to large projects. Creative recycling of existing infrastructure and local assets form a working framework for a growing network of interrelated and self-reliant urban villages.
Through a ToolBox of innovative solutions and resources - technical, educational and financial - GrowTown empowers people and neighborhoods that have few resources to envision their own future and be the inventors of the post-industrial city.
The Oakman neighborhood in Detroit, with plans for a farm, housing and adaptive reuse of an historic building is currently being coordinated with a local non-profit. We have begun partnering with two more neighborhoods and the ToolBox content and format are being developed.

How does your strategy and approach respond creatively and comprehensively to key issues?

Detroit spreads over 138 sq. miles and suffers an unemployment rate of 28.9%. Already described as a food desert, many residents will be vulnerable to disruptions in an increasingly fragile global food supply. Growtown is a comprehensive integration of solutions to food security, urban form, sustainability, and human health and well-being. Implementation begins at the grassroots level where people are scattered over the post-industrial wasteland.
GrowTowns are organized around the year-round Urban Farming Marketplace, the physical design of core Civic Spaces, and the GrowTown ToolBox of resources and solutions.
Emerging techniques of all season farming in the northern climate make the urban farm a viable source of fresh food and income in Detroit. Food is a basic need that connects everyone. Thus, the local food marketplace generates a primary hub of activity for growing community and economic complexity.
Central to the GrowTown concept is the spatial design of civic spaces at the neighborhood level. Civic space is a key feature that enables social interaction and place identity to evolve and grow.
The ToolBox combines local energy and initiative with knowledge, tools and resources to make things happen and get things done. GrowTown believes a simple idea and a small opportunity can change a whole community. An adaptable resource of doable, low-cost and even no-cost ideas and solutions, makes it possible for people and neighborhoods to envision projects and start change immediately, even when little capital is available.
Thriving organic food systems naturally depend on biodiversity and healthy ecological functions. GrowTown strategies nourish and foster civic stewardship of the land, blending natural and social systems. Based on solutions that feed people, create health, and build an economy aimed at self-reliance, GrowTown is the preferred model of growth in failing neighborhoods. It is for everyone, it is sustainable, it can start now.