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One of the United States’ biggest cities is in free fall, with so many residents fleeing that it is ready to disown the neighbourhoods they left behind. But could the weeds of urban neglect become the green shoots of hope?

In 1967 John Lee Hooker recorded Motor City Is Burning, about the race riots that racked his adopted hometown that year. Some say Detroit’s decline began then, but it plunged faster into its current mire with the collapse of the US auto industry in 2008. Home to about a third of that industry, the state of Michigan has taken most of the pain: an estimated 230,000 jobs have gone in the past three years.