On the edge of the Buick City site stands a patch of land known as Oak Park, once the focal point of a thriving autoworker neighborhood, now home to little more than the skeletal remains of a long-neglected playground. Here, too, Flint's past enters the present in ways that make the city's future ambiguous and uncertain. In the early days of the auto boom, Oak Park was the location of a tent city hastily erected by settlers flooding in to seek work at Flint's fledgling car factories. The park took shape on land gifted to the city by the Durant Dort Carriage Co., soon to become General Motors. The company gave up other parcels as well--for churches, for schools. It built the neighborhood that grew up around the park, and many more like it across the city. And it built them in its own image, engineering for its employees a docile, middle-class existence, with the paternalistic corporate master serving as the guarantor of the American Dream. The collapse of the neighborhood that embodied that dream left Oak Park isolated, underutilized. The city began trying to sell it in the mid-1980s--back to GM, ironically enough. Now the park's future, just like its past, is tied to Buick City, woven into the redevelopment plans that include the brownfield on its eastern border.
But what shape will redevelopment take in the wake of industrialism's dream-turned-nightmare? The building to the south of the park offers a clue: a brand new factory, constructed on one of the two pieces of the Buick City site that have been sold off in recent years. Inside its walls, a new generation of workers, including some Flint residents, builds car seats for delivery to the GM assembly plant on the south side of town. To what extent will this old-new version of development avoid the pitfalls of what preceded it? Certainly, as Flint residents struggle to turn from the crisis of the toxic present toward whatever promise lies ahead, they do so far more soberly than their ancestors, wary of industrial gifts that come bearing a pinch--or two--of poison. Whether their own interests as the people who work, live, eat, breathe, and play in these areas determine what becomes of places like Oak Park, however, will depend on whether they are able to develop their own visions of the future and organize around their own agendas, rather than being stitched into yet another corporate fabric.
On the edge of the Buick City site stands a patch of land known as Oak Park, once the focal point of a thriving autoworker neighborhood, now home to little more than the skeletal remains of a long-neglected playground. Here, too, Flint's past enters the present in ways that make the city's future ambiguous and uncertain. In the early days of the auto boom, Oak Park was the location of a tent city hastily erected by settlers flooding in to seek work at Flint's fledgling car factories. The park took shape on land gifted to the city by the Durant Dort Carriage Co., soon to become General Motors. The company gave up other parcels as well--for churches, for schools. It built the neighborhood that grew up around the park, and many more like it across the city. And it built them in its own image, engineering for its employees a docile, middle-class existence, with the paternalistic corporate master serving as the guarantor of the American Dream. The collapse of the neighborhood that embodied that dream left Oak Park isolated, underutilized. The city began trying to sell it in the mid-1980s--back to GM, ironically enough. Now the park's future, just like its past, is tied to Buick City, woven into the redevelopment plans that include the brownfield on its eastern border.
But what shape will redevelopment take in the wake of industrialism's dream-turned-nightmare? The building to the south of the park offers a clue: a brand new factory, constructed on one of the two pieces of the Buick City site that have been sold off in recent years. Inside its walls, a new generation of workers, including some Flint residents, builds car seats for delivery to the GM assembly plant on the south side of town. To what extent will this old-new version of development avoid the pitfalls of what preceded it? Certainly, as Flint residents struggle to turn from the crisis of the toxic present toward whatever promise lies ahead, they do so far more soberly than their ancestors, wary of industrial gifts that come bearing a pinch--or two--of poison. Whether their own interests as the people who work, live, eat, breathe, and play in these areas determine what becomes of places like Oak Park, however, will depend on whether they are able to develop their own visions of the future and organize around their own agendas, rather than being stitched into yet another corporate fabric.