I’m in Detroit for the US Social Forum this week. Not much to say–it’s fabulous and I’ve been hella busy–but there’s one thing I wanted to comment on before I pass off the laptop to my lovely traveling companion.
Detroit is really, really empty.
Walking through the center of downtown at rush hour, there was only a light smattering of cars on the wide, major roads. Few pedestrians. It’s hard to tell if a lot of businesses are open, and those that are have few customers and close early.
There are tons of abandoned buildings, vacant lots, streets with only one house left per block.
And there are nice, solid-looking, architecturally interesting abandoned buildings. Art-deco era semi-scyscrapers, giant Victorian houses, stuff like that. Not just ugly shit is vacant.
I was joking earlier that I keep expecting zombies to come out from somewhere.
My partner just said it looks like they already did, got bored, and moved on.
I’m used to urban poverty going hand-in-hand with overpopulation. Cities get full, prices go up, people get squeezed out of their homes or have to crowd more people into each apartment. I had unconsciously assumed it was something of a law of nature.
But this is different. Eerie. And also full of a weird sort of unrealizable potential–I keep thinking, there are so many empty buildings and so many people living on the streets, it seems like at some point someone would have to just say fuck it, and look the other way on urban homesteading.
I’m so accustomed to problems of scarcity, it’s hard to imagine a collapse that brings overabundance of space. And yet, something tells me Detroit is the wave of the future for America.
