The Art of Shrinking Cities

A few museums in Detroit take a stab at exploring cities on the decline:

"It wasn't resonating in Manhattan," says the Cranbrook museum's director, Gregory Wittkopp, of a much smaller version of the show that has been seen in Manhattan. And why would it? "Shrinking Cities" is deeply engaged art, passionate about moral and practical issues that don't always animate the contemporary art scene in New York. It has all the edge, the irony, the gamester play with the conventions and boundaries that one expects of a major exhibition of contemporary art in a thriving metropolitan center. But it also has gravitas.

In a section of the exhibition called "Organizing Retreat," the curators examine ideas that would have caused howls of protest among the prickly boosters of Detroit only five or 10 years ago -- accepting shrinkage and using it to advantage, to new environmental or agricultural ends. They look back a quarter of a century to the radical Italian architectural firm Superstudio with a print called "Continuous Conveyer Belt City." The diagram shows a terrifying apparatus, as wide as a city, that chews up raw land and spits out new buildings, which slowly decay, fading back into the landscape like water behind a boat.

That all sounds like fancy art talk to me, though. I'm just a hillbilly. But some of this sounds oddly grim and even fascinating:

Another project demonstrates that as people in Detroit purchase the empty lots around their houses to assemble large urban yards -- or "blots" -- they are effectively "surbanizing" the old city.

And:

In another, there's a video about how people in the areas outside Detroit are exhuming their dead relatives from urban cemeteries for reburial, closer to home, in the vastly expanding suburbs.

Check it out.

Comments

[Ken Thompson]

very interesting blogs. having grown up in the burg i too am particularly interested in the fate of old industrial regions and the people in them. my work has focused on how the people survive after the invisible hand of the market drops them- my blog (much less developed then yours) is called visiblehands. it seeks to begin linking deindustrialized regions around the world as a network of solidarity and mutual learning. you might find the us/uk dialogue on achieving health equity in post deindustrialized regions of interest. i suspect you will find my socialist leanings somewhat problematice, unless you have a bit of an anarcho/syndicalist tint to your libertarianism. (by the way, how are people supposed to individually cope with the vissisitudes of the market??)
but rather then focusing on our differences, lets look at whats in common. a love of this place and hope for its future and for the future of the people living here.
i always understood the hell with its lid quote as being about the burgeoing iron industry, with the fires being the fires of the iron puddlers. it was an awesome sight in its day. and the people of the time where both terrified and fascinated. you might find an interview i did about it with carol coletta from the radio show Smart Cities of some interest. (google smart cities and carol coletta (colletta?) and look at the pod casts. i spoke in late november.
look forward to reading more.

ken thompson md
associate professor of psychiatry and public health, university of pittsburgh

[John Morris]

I have a lot to say about this show and have been in some touch with people of in Detroit but I am too busy to go into everything.

Yes, the show doesn't resonate well in NY. Trying to get people in a city with a massive shortage of housing, surging imigrant population and the lowest unemployment rate in years to get into this is pretty hard.

By the way, it is always good to remember that for almost every shrinking city there is growing diaspora. Detroit is of constant interest, in that it's Diaspora is even bigger and perhaps more passionate than the Steeler nation.

[John Morris]

and how is this for a shrinking city??????

Watch out, Pittsburgh dirt bags I know some people who want to help you shrink.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07046/762136-56.stm