In the related article the photographers say:
"As Europeans, we were looking with an outsider's eye, which made downtown Detroit seem even more strange and dramatic," says Meffre. "We are not used to seeing empty buildings left intact. In Europe, salvage companies move in immediately and take what they can sell as antiques. Here, they only take the metal piping to sell for scrap. In the Vanity ballroom alone, we saw four giant art deco chandeliers, beautiful objects, each one unique. It was almost unbelievable that they could still be there. It is as if America has no sense of its own architectural history and culture."This is very much a symptom of the cycles of capital with the decline of Detroits' reason for being (that being the motor industry), and racial politics with "white flight" leaving a largely poor, and African-American city centre. To overthrow capitalism and replace it by something better is a laudable, and vital, aim. In Detroit it is as if capitalism has abandoned the people and their infrastructure, leaving little in the way of food shops and all the other essesntials of modern existence.
The conclusion is worth reading:
as [Thomas J Sugrue, author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit] puts it: "The abandoned factories, the eerily vacant schools, the rotting houses, and gutted skyscrapers that Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre chronicle are the artefacts of Detroit's astonishing rise as a global capital of capitalism and its even more extraordinary descent into ruin, a place where the boundaries between the American dream and the American nightmare, between prosperity and poverty, between the permanent and the ephemeral are powerfully and painfully visible. No place epitomises the creative and destructive forces of modernity more than Detroit, past and present."
3 comments:
With the enormous amounts of debt US metropolitan areas are suffering, Detroit maybe representative of the decline to come over the next few years. Both in terms of American cities and the US as a whole. The ramifications perhaps not so much for global capital, so much as the 'free' market system may well be severe.
It is imperative that the US grabs any opportunities it can to forge ahead and re- establish itself globally. I'm thinking of the opportunities in terms of renewable energies, and consequently cutting the reliance on fossil fuels. We can be sure that China will.
With the political gridlock in US, and possibly worse to come with the election of the Republicans in 2012, it seems very unlikley the US will start taking the steps necessary for recovery.
It's as if a nation based on migration can't stop moving. As native Americans are described as following buffalo many Americans follow the next thing.
You can see it in ghost towns in old western films. Once a setlement has served its purpose people move on. That purpose may have been a staging post for successive migrants or a gold mine. Once the purpose has gone those who can move. Those who stay live in a decaying netherworld, haunted by the spirit of commerce past.
Agree that the US is a nation of migrants, and within the diaspora there is always a pecking order. The most recent migrants who have acheived a measure of success, settled and put down routes, obstruct and villify the new migrants. Whilst maintaining the illusion of an open arm policy, access to all. The Cimino movie Heavens Gate springs to mind.
I am not completely sure you can understand any people, by applying just one idea about their nature to them. Yes there is a history of the nomadic nature of the indigenous Americans and the pioneering spirit of the first European settlers led them to follow the next big thing. However the bedrock of European culture is farming, and the white man settled right across the midwest. The problems for the North Eastern US cities is the transiant nature of modern industry.
Post a Comment