de-

TROIT

from Curbed: "Starting in the early 90s, photographer Kevin Bauman took photographs of 100 abandoned houses in Detroit, Michigan" (photographs are his)

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i want to go here. must. see. this. must see before gone. now.

these places fascinate me. they are at once depressing and incredibly beautiful (melancholy?). it strikes me that these neighborhoods that were at once subdivided from larger parcels have been reverse subdivided by the deleting of their neighbors. imagine a new era of urban homesteading where new yorker's sick of their tiny apartments but still desiring the cachet of a big city move to the abandoned blocks of detroit and buffalo to establish farms amidst the street grid of a disappeared city.

the once fertile grounds are consolidated block by block and the streets disappear to rows of crops and windbreaks... the once abandoned apartment houses are reborn as bunkhouses for migrant workers who report to the ruralized townhouse for their daily directions. plowing digs up children's toys and abandoned fragments of heirlooms, sprinkler systems, forgetten fire hydrants, furniture... and a collapsing sewer system inverts itself into marshes and slowly establishing creeks.

the migration west of the last fifty years that continues to develop the farms of the west results in the re-establishment of farms in the east. could this be measured? could the continuing (?) displacement in the west be replaced with an equal amount of new farming in formerly urban neighborhoods like those in detroit? new development across the country could be required to subsidize the urban homesteaders as an act of recompense for the farmland they've erased... the same could be applied to logging!! the detroit of the future: a city amidst farms and forest?

EDIT: lori brought up a good idea... could the ordos 100 project be reworked and implemented in a place like this, a sort of ordos meets 8 mile concept? sounds like a recipe for michigan drug plantations, rapping architects, hmm...




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