I think you should research urban agriculture. Take Detroit as an example because I grew up there and return often. Detroit currently has hundreds of vacant acres of cheap land that you could leverage to boot a new city. I think there are large opportunities in urban agriculture. Parts of the city are a food desert, until three years ago there wasn’t a single supermarket in a city with close to 700,000 people.
While best practices are pretty settled for regular farming, it’s decidedly not so for urban Ag. Detroit has a quite high rate of unemployment, especially for teenagers. There’s an opportunity to provide those kids with their first job and create value for the community where currently there is none.
There are people who want to do it, but the risk is too high because there are so many unanswered questions. Create a handbook of best practices and I think you could use it just as easily in Los Angeles, Philadelphia or Chicago as well as in Detroit.
I've never understood "urban agriculture". Cities have one of the highest land prices due to their proximity to people/commercial centers, I don't know why turning that into a farm, which takes tons of land, makes sense.
On the other hand, I'm very interested in studying the very long-range evolution of cities (500+ years). It fascinates me that Detroit was kind of this pre-Silicon Valley area with high concentration of a single industry and tons of wealth, and after that's left, what happens now? How does a city reconfigure itself when its tax base drops by, say, 50%? How does it deal with its pension obligations, massive infrastructure bill from all the now-not-needed roads, parks, water pipes, city lights, and buildings? In short, how does a city "scale down" in a way that isn't damaging to its institutions or retirees?
I think you should research urban agriculture. Take Detroit as an example because I grew up there and return often. Detroit currently has hundreds of vacant acres of cheap land that you could leverage to boot a new city. I think there are large opportunities in urban agriculture. Parts of the city are a food desert, until three years ago there wasn’t a single supermarket in a city with close to 700,000 people.
While best practices are pretty settled for regular farming, it’s decidedly not so for urban Ag. Detroit has a quite high rate of unemployment, especially for teenagers. There’s an opportunity to provide those kids with their first job and create value for the community where currently there is none.
There are people who want to do it, but the risk is too high because there are so many unanswered questions. Create a handbook of best practices and I think you could use it just as easily in Los Angeles, Philadelphia or Chicago as well as in Detroit.