Since July became the largest city of Americans in bankruptcy, much has been said about Detroit. We have heard a lot, read a lot, but above all we have seen a lot, through photographic reports that have exploited to the limit the aesthetic appeal of disasters. Named after Ruin porn (pornography of the ruins), we have known the remains of the past of Detroit thanks to this phenomenon: the Michigan Theatre, the most elegant parking in the world, the Neo-Renaissance skyscraper Book Tower of 38 empty floors, the neoclassical emblem of the city of Brush Park and, at the top of the podium.

The failure of a city model

In the early 20th century, the automobile industry made Detroit the fourth largest city in the United States. Proof of this are the elegant skyscrapers of downtown: steel structures and stone facades remind us of the nostalgic splendor of successful cities such as Chicago or New York. Ford, General Motors and Chrysler created thousands of jobs, so 300,000 inhabitants in 1900 were 1,500,000 in 1930 and nearly two million in 1950. And nine out of ten were white.

They made cars in Detroit, but they produced a lot more than that: it was an American dream, actually a final product. Personal autonomy with single-family home garden, sense of security, success. The old Detroit broke a new city model and it was so successful that the new city model supplanted the old one until it became unusable. After a long period of splendor, the dream had become a nightmare for Detroit. In fact, the history of the second half of the century is totally different. The workshops began to be located outside the city's borders. Meanwhile, the middle and upper classes left half the city and went to live outdoors, to larger houses, to more isolated neighborhoods, to more homogeneous municipalities, which fulfilled the characteristics of a successful life. In the era of the private vehicle, the new city was abroad, to the point of turning the center into an obsolete concept of the past. As a vicious circle, this phenomenon increased over decades: as soon as he began to notice symptoms of abandonment in a neighborhood, the flight of its inhabitants accelerated. So in a few decades, Detroit has lost two-thirds of its population.

However, there is a significant difference compared to other cities that have happened to them in a similar way: in this case, the metropolitan area has received all that population loss and much more. I mean, if the city of Detroit has lost two-thirds of its population in a very short time, the metropolitan area has earned two million in the same period. In these times of decline in Detroit, its metropolitan area has a healthy and diversified economy, with a per capita income above the U.S. average. And like the Detroit early this century, nine out of ten are white.

In fact, the protagonists of this leak have the white color of the skin. In just half a century, the city of Detroit has gone from almost entirely white to almost entirely black. This phenomenon, known as White flight, perfectly shows the direct relationship between race and social class: the leakage of middle and high classes, the leakage of white people and the leakage of capital are the same leakage.

The city you contract

Since the beginning of industrialization, urban organization has focused almost exclusively on growth processes (demographic, economic). Today, at a time when this stage of history is over, the decline is presented to us as a reality to be faced. The cities that have suffered this phenomenon are called shrinking cities; Detroit, the most extreme shrinking city, is an ideal scenario for exploring new paths. These new paths are represented in the Detroit Future City project. The document, drawn up between the public administration, the private sector and various agents of the city, provides for the stabilization of the population of around 700,000 inhabitants. Few, very few are the 700,000 inhabitants in a city that has a size of two million inhabitants, because the money raised through taxes is not enough to cover the main ones. Mobility, water, electricity and the sewerage network, for example, have become swamped by the enormous area of the city and its low density. But hard bread is a sharp tooth. Because of the extreme low density of the problem, the responses are also extreme, as they have set the goal of displacing a part of the population, literally. If we have historically removed land from rural land for the benefit of urban land, Detroit wants to return to agriculture those land that would be empty, taking to the extreme the logic of the expression “we are what we eat”. This would also condition mobility policy, as it could lead to a change of strategy. The aim is not to extend the ad infinitum transport network, but to simplify it and make it efficient to compete with the private vehicle. By denying some of the decisions we have taken in the name of development, this is how the city represents its future. If it's an exception or the beginning of a new wave, time will tell.

After calming the feeling of emptiness and loneliness, it is already noon. Upgrade-time. Restaurants are few but crowded, indicating the existence of workplaces. Bicycles move safely on the avenues perhaps not too wide, as they do not need a differentiated bidegorri. A few tourists, with the camera in their hand, continue to look for calamar buildings and despise living beings with doubtful success. In short, reality is not as apocalyptic as the famous series of photographs by Yves Marchand and and Romain Meffre. Baiki, Detroit has lived better times, but it's still alive. In the valley, but alive.