and foreclosed homes, working in the wake of dedicated community activists who have long pushed to transform these spaces to benefit their neighborhoods. Detroit faces a thicket of challenges right now, but many see the potential of this vacant land to catalyze Detroit's future growth.

"Want to live in the country 10 minutes from the city? Here we have it."

Jeff Klein opened his gardening supply store, Detroit Farm and Garden, three years ago in a former police precinct-turned-gallery and commercial space in the near southwest side. A landscape architect who has helped design and develop a series of pocket parks in North Corktown, a neighborhood opposite the site of the old Detroit Tigers stadium, Klein has witnessed the rapid growth of Detroit's urban agriculture scene over the past 14years. "There's no change, and lots of change." In some ways, that's true—at its outset, the city was lined with strips of tended fields, called ribbon farms, connected to the Detroit River, and modern urban farmers have tilled the city's soil since midcentury. But a new generation of farmers have begun to reclaim urban space at a much faster pace. One estimate puts total production last year at 400,000 pounds of produce in the city alone, and according to Gary Wozniak, president of the economic development agency RecoveryPark, that's just scratching the surface of the potential market. Within a 300-mile radius of downtown Detroit, there are 49 million people who spend $17 billion annually on fresh produce. Only 18 percent of that is locally sourced.

The variety of urban