The urban prairie

Summary

August 11, 2008. Increasingly large numbers of people in Detroit are converting urban prairie into farmland as many supermarket chains have left the city and created a food desert. Some of them have begun to work in collectives and create large farms around abandoned buildings.

Source

Bibliography

1. Original article

Game and Story Use

• These farms can serve as a good model for After The End settings - worlds where quite a bit of the infrastructure survive through the The End Of The World As We Know It event and people still live in cities - but there are far less people around than they used to be.
  • A good example is the aftermath of a Zombie Apocalypse - lots of people have died, but once the zombies are defeated in one way or another, there are plenty of resources worth plundering in the cities to make living there interesting. And urban farms like these will likely be sufficient for most food needs.
• These farmers might not actually own the land they farm on, especially if they are poor. If absentee landlords learn of this, they might start demanding money of the farmers despite having ignored the land for years. PCs might be hired by either side in this conflict to resolve it in one way or another.