Photo Amy K. Senese
An old friend once called me out on my attitude to Detroit. So it was with a wry smile, and a raised eyebrow, that I came across a recent podcast from On Being, titled 'Becoming Detroit: Reimagining Work, Food and Community'.
Familiar with NRP’s other offerings, This American Life and Fresh Air, I’m almost embarrassed to say that I’ve only just come across this show. I’d been asking around for those things that people use to develop their value systems and ways of positioning themselves within their lives, and this radio program came up.
With On Being, each week journalist Krista Tippett engages in conversations on the broader context and content of belief, however that crosses religion, spirituality, culture, meaning and identity. What I quickly realized though is that On Being is not just about faith – if that’s what might immediately turn you off. It’s about taking on the universal ideas of human experience, those fundamental questions that we typically don’t have time to ask, or answer, and it does so from points of view as diverse as food, physics, neuroscience and poetry. Or in the official words:
‘Krista envisioned a program that would draw out the intellectual and spiritual content of religion that should nourish our common life, but that is often obscured precisely when religion enters the news. Our sustained growth as a show has also been nurtured by a cultural shift that seeks conversation, shared life, and problem-solving within and across religious traditions and across categories of belief and non-belief. On Being has both responded and contributed to a growing acknowledgement that there are basic questions of meaning that pertain to the entire human experience. The particular dramas and dynamics of the 21st century — ecological, political, cultural, technological, and economic — are bringing this into relief.’
So back to that podcast on the renewal of Detroit, through which threads the testimony of Grace Lee Boggs. The philosopher and civil rights legend describes how the ongoing restoration of neighborhoods and communities through a focus on urban farming and activism has led people to learn new ways of caring for one another. This evolving relationship with the city has given them the opportunity to rediscover who they really are. For her Detroit is being developed not only as a symbol of the ‘new society that is building’ but also of ‘a new kind of human identity’ that is being developed.
That Lee Boggs' experiences and approach are grounded in something very real, her own long history in Detroit, takes away the empty posturing and esoteric philosophy that can come with the classic narrative of urban renewal. For her, this is about people being, or becoming, people again in the broadest sense, with the city serving them, rather than them the city:
‘There is something about people beginning to seek solutions by doing things for themselves, by deciding that they are going to create new concepts… and that they have the capacity in themselves. And that we have that capacity to make the world anew.’
Our environments shape who we are, but as this program attests, we can turn this equation around: we can shape our environments in order to then ourselves define the shape of who we are. We can build, and move towards, communities that support us. And healthier communities usually means healthier, and happier, people.
Cities, as much our our attitudes about them, can change. Even if that city is Detroit.