Face to face, two buildings of around twenty floors are fading and burning on the arid ground. Under the blows of cranes and backhoes, their red bricks are shattered. Water cannons have great difficulty in circumscribing the clouds of dust that emanate from the debris, further adding to the atmosphere.
In the streets of Detroit, the main city of Michigan, fallen queen of the automobile industry declared bankrupt in July 2013, the scene is now as banal as were the assembly lines of Ford, Chrysler or General Motors. Images of ruined buildings have almost become the essence of this city of past industrial excess, gradually abandoned by its demiurges.
A paradise for lovers of urban exploration that has become the nightmare of the inhabitants, who rub shoulders with post-industrial atavism every day: buildings squatted by dealers or prostitutes, wild dumps where tires and garbage pile up, empty buildings that the the sun pierces before becoming again, at night, the dismal hideout whose inhabitants advise to move away. In certain districts, life only subsists in fragments. One or two homes lived here or there. Then wasteland, abandoned factories, charred mounds, desolate land. The wreckage of an economic war that devastated Detroit and a lasting stain on the city’s reputation.
« Shrinking City »
The city wants to dismantle this past which compromises its future. The Detroit Blight Removal Task Force, a coalition of public and private authorities brought together by Barack Obama in 2013, has identified just over 80,000 dilapidated structures, according to a report released in May. This figure, however high, does not frighten the public authorities. “We want to have everything cleaned up in five years”, says Brian Farkas, director of special projects at the city’s buildings agency.
But, a sign that times are changing in “Motown” (the city of the automobile), we are now advocating “green” demolition. “Recycling”, “recovery”, “deconstruction”: so many keywords that punctuate the speeches of those responsible for this titanic project. « We don’t want to do like in the past : destroy buildings and leave construction sites lying around for several months until wild dumps multiply, says Brian Farkas. We have a real opportunity to do something interesting from an environmental point of view. “
A monumental enterprise awaits Detroit. At the height of its past excess. About a third of the housing stock is uninhabited because, in half a century, “Motor City” has lost a large part of its population, becoming “Shrinking City”, the shrinking city. The old standard of the American dream had 2 million inhabitants in the 1950s: today, only 700,000 people populate the desert streets. A touch of grief that the subprime crisis in the summer of 2007 continued to shrink.
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