2179877882_12b38144b3Detroit has become the center of almost a tourist attraction, a paradise for photographyof urban spaces in decline that has made it possible to create photographic collections that appeal to the sensibility of the distant observer attracted to those scenarios of decadence in a a city that, barely fifty years ago, was a powerful center of economic attraction and that since 1970 has suffered a kind of Katrina in slow motion since the beginning of the decline of the powerful automobile industry, the beginnings of the flight of the wealthiest population from the center towards the suburban residential peripheries and the social explosion of the ’60s.

Detroit is also the perfect example for urbanists who want to talk about the phenomenon of shrinking cities, cities that fall into economic decline and see how the population flees due to the lack of opportunities, leaving behind a landscape of abandoned houses and disused infrastructure and equipment here you can see a< a href="http://detroityes.com/toc.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener">full catalog). It is not a new phenomenon, history, so capricious, has been giving and taking away power from empires, countries and cities (see this video, which shows the cities that at each moment have lost population in the world in the period 1900-2000)). For some, this sway of Detroit’s decline It’s starting to border on pornography, a taste for disaster and maybe they’re right, but today Detroit represents great fear of what a city does not want to be and the perfect place for decay photography.

Meanwhile, different plans have called the seeking solutions for the city: reuse disused spaces such as urban gardens, looking in the mirror of Turin and its successful renovation after industrial decline a few decades ago, developing a massive program of destruction of abandoned neighborhoods, etc. A laboratorywhere to experiment solutions for lifeless urban spaces, the perfect place for theoretical musing and more or less ingenious proposals to recover a place sunk in lethargy. In this blog you can find a good account of its history more recent as well as, once again, amazing photographs.

The attraction of the photographic collections on the city (see a list below) is undeniable, they have the influence of showing the viewer through a peephole through which the effect of the passage of time can be seen in a setting that has lost all its vitality. Urban exploration, especially of decadent spaces, is a subgenre that is leaving great visual works and that helps to understand a little better that even large cities that were not long ago the center of the Fordist economy are today a failed city.

Photo reports on the decline of Detroit

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Image taken from The Commons gallery of flickr