“Permaculture initiatives are indeed popping up throughout the city — including the Chiwara development in Highland Park that Dennis Archambault covered in Model D a few weeks ago. My search for other noteworthy projects led me to Blair Evans, whose organization Incite Focus, a “platform for community production,” demonstrates the revolutionary potential of applying permaculture principles in the context of Detroit’s DIY maker culture.”
Excerpted from Matthew Piper:
“We’re in an environment in Detroit where people in very large numbers have been displaced from the position in the economy they had previously occupied and planned on continuing to occupy, and that’s because of a structural shift, not a temporary change. So how can we use permaculture to imagine what the future of Detroit for Detroiters could look like?”
That’s where the fab lab comes in. Blair believes that advances in digital production technology have reached the point at which, with an ecological approach to design and building in mind, people are now truly capable of producing most of the things they need. “Shelter, water, food, energy — these are all things that we can actually harvest and produce. They’re all around us; we’re just not properly utilizing them.”
Economically displaced Detroiters, Blair believes, should not wait for new industries to come along and absorb them into the workforce. Even if that were to happen, which he thinks unlikely, it would only return them to the fundamentally unhealthy, imbalanced system from which they were ejected in the first place.
“In permaculture,” he says, “you’re not a slave to the process. You’re a participant in the process. Behind a lot of this work is the idea of allowing people to have the opportunity to actually spend a reasonable portion of their time, a third of it, producing the things they need to live (furniture, for example, tools, even houses) themselves. Then you can spend a third of your time using the same tools to produce things that are useful for other people: community-based enterprises. Then you have another third left to to do the things that make you want to get up in the morning, usually the things your high school guidance counselor talked you out of.”
“If you’re not engaged in the rituals that touch your passions,” he says, “you’re not in a position to bring the best of yourself to anything that you do. In a large sense, then, this all comes down to creating an environment and cultural context in which people in Detroit are able to truly maximize our capacity as people.”
An ambitious and revolutionary goal, to be sure, but one rooted in a principle of the utmost simplicity: balance. Balance between consumption and production, between needs and wants, between individual and community.
Blair’s work exists at a crossroads that’s distinctly Detroit: it’s where the pursuits of designing, making, growing, community building, and imagining new and better futures all come together. Inspired by the close study of natural systems, it’s something else, too: a glimpse of what’s possible when we learn to understand and speak the language of nature.”