ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the consistent visionary organizing that has emerged over the last fifty years in Detroit. As industrial capital abandoned the city, people were faced with the question of how to create lives in the context of racial capitalism and in the wake of the devastation of the land, air, and water. Struggles to restore land for agriculture, to stop pollution of the air and to protect water as a human right have generated organizing strategies for the protection of people and the places that sustain us. This chapter examines strategies of resistance in the emerging multi-racial but predominantly African American movements for justice, as well as the development of alternative institutions and practices to redefine city life based on values of care and compassion.
