![]() ![]() As decay often is, this Detroit is intensely photogenic – beautiful, apocalyptic Detroit "ruin porn", a phrase used by local critics of the phenomenon, Binelli included, has become an internet craze, a colour magazine staple, a coffee-table book mini-genre. Modern Detroit is world-famous not for its mania but for its entropy: derelict skyscrapers, collapsing houses, abandoned husks of businesses and civic amenities, all of them slowly sinking into what he calls "urban prairie", a post-human landscape of returning wild plants and animals. Detroit has so much vacant land, writes Mark Binelli, "all of Paris could fit" into its empty spaces. The city is still doing that, yet nowadays the pattern is different. In 1934, Anne O'Hare McCormick of the New York Times wrote about Detroit's "democratized luxuries, with gas stations on every corner, chain stores, moving-picture palaces … as truly a world capital as any city on earth … Paris dictates a season's silhouette, but Detroit manufactures a pattern of life." The manic, mechanised, overcrowded metropolis of General Motors and Ford also drew journalists and writers. Migrants, many of them African-Americans from the rural South, were drawn by its pioneering car factories with their unprecedentedly high wages. I n 1920, Detroit was the fourth biggest city in America. ![]()
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