Jun 17, 2022
Editor’s Note: The MUFI Project in Detroit's North End Neighborhood is a stand-out example of what can happen when community values are placed at the centre of urban growing practices. Known as an agrihood, this type of urban farming project makes use of residential space to provide locals with sustainable and nutritious food options, all while contributing to a project of community cohesion.
Written By AJ DELLINGER
For most Americans, by the time a piece of fruit or vegetable lands on your counter or in your refrigerator, it has traveled about 1,500 miles. For residents of Detroit's North End community, it’s a matter of a couple of city blocks.
About a decade ago, Tyson Gersh and a crew of students from the University of Michigan started the Michigan Urban Farming Initiative (MUFI), part of a growing trend of urban farms that were cropping up around the city. The all-volunteer effort set down stakes in a two-square-block area of the North End neighborhood and built up its campus with the goal of reducing food insecurity by making production-scale farming within the community itself. By 2016, the group had built the country’s first sustainable urban agricultural neighborhood — also known as an agrihood.
Image of the urban farm located in Detroit, Michigan and operated by the Michigan Urban Farming Initiative; Source: MICHIGAN URBAN FARMING INITIATIVE
In the years since it launched, MUFI has become a model for a neighborhood that centers around community farming. More than 10,000 volunteers have offered up more than 100,000 hours of support and service to the project, which has yielded over 50,000 pounds of produce, including 300 different types of vegetables. That food has been distributed to more than 2,000 households located within a 2-square-mile radius of the MUFI campus, as well as local churches and food pantries. Community members pay what they can.
“We’ve grown from an urban garden that provides fresh produce for our residents to a diverse, agricultural campus that has helped sustain the neighborhood and attracted new residents and area investment,” Gersh said in 2016.
MUFI has its foot in the door on two separate but growing movements: urban farming, which has taken hold in Detroit in particular but is making its way across the county, and the agrihood trend. Both efforts seek to build communities around agriculture, but agrihoods are rethinking planned neighborhoods and land usage in a more wholesale way — driven largely by millennials who want to make more of their green space.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, as the population of United States boomed, developers started building neighborhoods around amenities that appealed to the young adults of the era. At the time, golf courses were a centerpiece of planned communities; at one point, 1 in 4 golf courses built in the U.S. were created as part of a real estate development. That arrangement worked at the time, but has fallen out of favor for a number of reasons — not least of which is the fact that homes in these communities come at a premium, pricing out younger buyers who both have less to spend than previous generations and, frankly, couldn’t care less about golf.
Instead of fairways and greens — which are a deeply wasteful use of land, by the way — the new generation of homeowners seeks sustainability, healthier lifestyles, and a sense of contributing to social good. Hence, the agrihood.
The concept isn’t new, exactly; community gardens and urban agriculture projects were once quite popular during the Great Depression. But it has been newly formalized among housing development projects. In 2016, the Urban Land Institute provided a definition of an agrihood: a master-planned housing community with food-based amenities like working farms. Currently, there are about 200 agrihoods located in 28 states across the U.S., with more planned by developers looking to attract younger homebuyers.
