As the gears of federal government have ground to a halt, a new energy has been rocking the foundations of our urban centers. From Atlanta to Seattle and points in between, cities have begun seizing the initiative, transforming themselves into laboratories for progressive innovation. Cities Rising is The Nation’s chronicle of those urban experiments.
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On the morning of July 3, as dozens of people flocked to the center of Detroit to begin a seven-day, 70-mile walk from the Motor City to Flint, Michigan, Mona Stonefish, an indigenous elder with gray-streaked hair, blessed the group with the Anishinaabe water song. “If there’s no water, our children will not survive,” Stonefish said before breaking into song, keeping the beat by shaking a gum container filled with coins.
The group had gathered in front of City Hall in downtown Detroit, and all around them, the business district was revving to life. Young transplants were sipping coffee nearby, while employees from Quicken Loans, a mortgage-lending company whose owner, Dan Gilbert, is driving much of the city’s targeted gentrification, breezed to work. Here, it seemed, was a city experiencing an economic revival. Yet just outside this sliver of city, as many as 25,000 Detroit families were facing the threat of having their water turned off for lack of payment.
“When our water is under attack, what do we do?” shouted community organizer Monica Lewis-Patrick. “Stand up! Fight back!” people responded.
The crowd began to surge northward, as marchers took the first steps in a weeklong journey to demand clean, affordable water—not only for Detroit residents, but for people throughout Michigan and the states beyond.
The march, which harked back to this country’s long history of civil-rights treks, was the latest push by a band of Detroiters who have been literally thirsting for justice. Over the last year, as the city has waged an unprecedented campaign to shut off water to residents over unpaid bills, these activists have turned Detroit into the epicenter of a growing national struggle over whether water constitutes a human right. This struggle began in the spring of 2014, when a private company contracted by the city began abruptly turning off the water to up to 900 homes a day. At the time, nearly half of Detroit’s residents were behind on their bills—the result of the increasingly unaffordable costs of utilities in a city where nearly 40 percent of the population lives in poverty. Within months, more than 30,000 households were without water, sparking a public-health crisis, condemnation from the United Nations, and a surging struggle to ensure that access to clean, affordable water becomes a legally recognized right in the United States.
The rise of Detroit’s water movement comes none too soon. One year after the wave of disconnections began, the threat of mass shutoffs has spread to Baltimore, while the climate-related drought in California has forced the government to institute water-use restrictions. From coast to coast, the United States is careening into an age of widespread water instability. And once again, as so many times before, the Motor City is on the front lines of the resistance.