Michael T. Martin

It seems that everyone is talking about Detroit.

Artists are decamping there to do site-specific installations in abandoned properties, city planners from around the world are testing out ideas about shrinking cities and generally working to reimagine the city, and photographers are documenting the decay and destruction that a 25% drop in population over 10 years reaps on a city. 

Meanwhile, Kwame Kilpatrick is being court-ordered to use profits from his new book to pay back large sums of money he stole from the city, nearly half of Detroit residents are functionally illiterate, and due to uneven depopulation, city services are spread extremely thin.

Detroit is in a similar place to New Orleans post-Katrina, but Detroit is not being infused with FEMA money. While the problems facing Detroit are steep, there is buzz around using the landscape as a testing ground for all sorts of ideas. 

What does this say about us as a society? When the economy fails and the government fails, people get together to do something. Their actions aren’t anti-government or anti-capitalism, necessarily, they’re just necessary. What Detroit will look like in 15 years is, for me, entirely impossible to imagine…but I guess that’s part of the draw.