mobility

Requiem for Detroit?

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OpXhd7iau8

 

Julien Temple's new film is a vivid evocation of an apocalyptic vision: a slow-motion Katrina that has had many more victims. Detroit was once America's fourth largest city.

Built by the car for the car, with its groundbreaking suburbs, freeways and shopping centre's, it was the embodiment of the American dream.

 

Now it is truly a dystrophic post-industrial city, in which 40 per cent of the land in the centre is returning to prairie. Greenery grows up through abandoned office blocks, houses and collapsing car plants, and swallows up streetlights. (www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00rkm3y)

 

Is this a model of what life is going to be for post-industrial cities?

 

The reliance on a few industries, the flight of the professional classes and the decline of the public sector are all examples that have occurred in Stoke on Trent. Even though there has been vast amount of public investment in the last 30 years these issues have failed to stop.

 

Russell Ingram