Cities // Current TV

The Ruins of Detroit: A Sad Narrative of Urban Life in America

“The Ruins of Detroit” is a powerful and disturbing collection of photographs, which are the result of a five-year collaboration by the French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre. “The Ruins of Detroit” tells the city’s story in one starkly beautiful photograph after another, adding up to nothing less than an end-of-empire narrative. The abandoned factories, the eerily vacant schools, the rotting houses and gutted skyscrapers chronicled by Marchand and Meffre 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 exemplifies both the creative and destructive forces of modernity more than Detroit, past and present.

In addition to these remarkable photographs, this piece presents a memorable slide show of additional images from the collection and a documentary short film. “Pure Detroit” is a short film by Ivan George with gorgeous cinematography, but it’s also one that confronts the viewer with dramatic images of the collapse and decay that rapid economic and social change can have upon urban life. The impact of the film has been described as somewhere between heaven, hell and quiet meditation. While “Pure Detroit” is a beautiful visual mood piece, it’s also incredibly sad. The film reveals so much about the rapid changes we’re encountering in our world right now, how the old things gets broken much faster than new things are put in their place. “Pure Detroit” serves as a powerful reminder of what the old things breaking down can be like for so many of us.

Again, this piece includes a number of striking high-resolution photographs, a memorable slide show and a documentary short film.

http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/01/02/the-ruins-of-detroit-a-sad-narrative-of-urban-life-in-america/“The Ruins of Detroit” is a powerful and disturbing collection of... more

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Eerie Chinese Ghost Cities

Reports of Chinese ghost cities have been trickling in for over a year. Previously, these reports were nothing more than abstract statistics but new images put a very real face on those figures.

Like a cheesy sci-fi flick where the human population has mysteriously vanished, these ghost cities sit eerily vacant while dead leaves collect in unswept and unused foyers. This is not Hollywood’s latest blockbuster but a stark reality.

Finance Asia reports that about 64 million apartments and houses have remained empty over the last 6 months. A truly shocking statistic considering that this figure represents potential housing for roughly 200 million people or almost two-thirds of the population of The United States.

Using the excuse that Chinese prefer buying to renting, Asian financial analysts are shaking off these insane figures as long-term investments. The idea is savvy investors recently flush with capital but fearful of a fickle stock market invest in property even though there are limited renters available to occupy them. But it is not beyond reason to suspect a financial bubble is forming or something far worse.

Al-Jazeera TV spoke with Patrick Chovanec of Tsinghua University who explained the situation in over-simplified terms, “Who wants to be the mayor who reports that he didn’t get 8% GDP growth this year? Nobody wants to come forward with that. So the incentives in the system are to build. And if that’s the easiest way to achieve that growth, then you build.” However an 8% growth does not begin to touch the 15% housing excess reported in these figures.

The truth of this situation is that these new cities and developments are money pits. Even though the properties sit completely vacant and ready to be lived in, occupation is not fiscally possible because they are in fact still born cities; created without the possibility of sustaining themselves. And so a bubble in the economy is formed. Like a cancer, that bubble will infect and corrupt any markets with which it comes in contact. These ‘investments’ are like ‘roach motels’ – your money goes in but it does not come out.

Looking to the future, it is obvious that this situation will further complicate. How long can investments sit around without generating revenue? We are familiar with concepts like junk bonds and derivatives, abstract markets that have created similar bubbles in our economy. But these ghost cities are actual physical manifestations of junk economics. These are fully realized projects representing billions in investment dollars and they are simply collecting dust!

One cannot help to question who gave the green light for these billion dollar projects and what is in fact the endgame for a prospectus with this scope.

more pics at link...

Jason Douglass
Infowars.com
December 20, 2010Reports of Chinese ghost cities have been trickling in for over a year. Previously,... more

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7 U.S. cities with the worst air pollution

The top U.S. cities with the worst air pollution.

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The cities that never sleep: Spectacular night-time photos of Earth taken from the space station that show London's lights shine brightest

We often look up at the sky at night and wonder at the stars, but from space Earth has... more

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World Population Growth Infographic

Just how much is the world's population expected to grow over the next 40 years?... more

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Welcome to Picher, Oklahoma, the U.S.'s most toxic city

Picher sprang up as a 20th-century boomtown—the “buckle” of the mining belt that ran through Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri. The earth underneath it produced most of the lead for US bullets in World Wars I and II and enough zinc to literally galvanize construction of the American suburbs. These raw materials were used to create stronger, water-resistant metal alloys, better batteries, and dietary supplements—the base materials of a modern society. Population peaked at 14,000 in 1926. When the lode ran dry in 1970, the mining companies moved out. Picher eventually became a Superfund site, and half a decade ago the state government offered residents an average of $55 per square foot to evacuate their homes. By September 2009, the police force had disbanded and the government dissolved. Picher was a dead city.

Except that a few people refused to leave. They call themselves chat rats, a loose and increasingly self-reliant colony armed with cell phones and Wi-Fi for communication and guns for driving off scrap-metal scavengers. It’s a life bordering on squalid—on the way out of the Gorillas Cage, Roberts spots shovel marks around the base of the burned-out signpost, the beginning of an attempt to steal it. Across the street, a former auction-house parking lot has become a dumping ground for tires. On the drive back out of town, he passes the abandoned high school and notices that the arts and crafts building has burned down. A man appears to be helping himself to bookshelves from an open classroom. Roberts can’t figure out why anyone would turn down the relocation money he’s offering. “Most people have bettered themselves through this process,” he says. “Now there are only radicals left.”

The apocalypse is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed. Urbanization has lured more people to bustling metropolises, but precious little thought has been given to what happens when these cities fail. Over time, the underlying systems and processes of civilization—from lead mining to offshore drilling to car commuting—slowly poison us. Power grids brown out, the climate heats up, and industrial accidents ravage ecosystems and cities alike. For all the famed cities with thousands of years of continuity—Paris, London, Cairo, Athens, Rome, Istanbul—most cities just stop. Picher isn’t simply another boomtown gone bust. It’s emblematic of what happens when a modern city dies: A few people stay behind, trying to hold on to what they can. They are the new homesteaders, trying to civilize a wasteland at the end of the world.Picher sprang up as a 20th-century boomtown—the “buckle” of the... more

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Dentist David Kennedy on Fluoride

This is an interview I conducted with David C. Kennedy, DDS, and former head of the... more

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History Pin

Ever wonder what the urban and rural landscapes of today looked like decades ago? All... more

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David Harvey's Urban Manifesto: Down With Suburbia; Down With Bloomberg's New York | Fast Company

"New York? The whole damn place has been turned into a suburb," sneered... more

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Walk-Through of NYC's American Museum of Natural History [video]

This is a rather nice video with a home-made feel to it. It presents a quick view of... more

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Lightning Strikes Three Buildings Simultaneously in Downtown Chicago [video]

For the third time in the last 6 days, another line of nasty storms rolled through... more

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Pushing up Daisies is not the same as Pushing up Cow Parsley [pic]

It's really strange how trying to name one flower image can provide a lesson in... more

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A pink daisy: Vaaleanpunainen Päivänkakkara [pic]

A pink daisy photographed in the Kaisaniemi Botanic Garden, University of Helsinki,... more

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Keväällä Suomenlinnassa [pic]

This is one of the last photographs I snapped in Helsinki -- I chose to spend my last... more

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Veistos [photography]

A striking outdoor sculpture. Photographed in the Kamppi neighborhood of Helsinki,... more

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Appliance Architecture by Dave Trautrimas

2 Posts With MANY objects--- LE Gallery- With images borrowed and... more

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Busker in Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Strassenmusiker [pic]

This is a busker whom I photographed at Hauptwache train station in downtown Frankfurt... more

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Sonnige Blume [pic]

I was lured out of my sickbed so I could photograph this lovely flower, which really... more

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Rosenblüte [pic]

A lovely orange colored rose that I photographed at the farmer's market outside... more

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St Bartholomew's Cathedral [Dom Sankt Bartholomäus] (detail) [pic]

The Gothic-style St Bartholomew's Cathedral in Frankfurt am Main is constructed... more

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