Resources for a sustainable future

11/3/2010 Guardian When the film- maker Roger Graef approached me last year to make a film about the rise and fall of Detroit I had very few preconceptions about the place.Like everyone else, I knew it as the Motor City, one of the great epicentres of
20th-century music, and home of the American automobile. Only when I arrived in
the city itself did the full-frontal cultural car crash that is 21st-century
Detroit became blindingly apparent.
Leaving behind the gift shops of the “Big Three” car manufacturers, the Motown
merchandise and the bizarre ejaculating fountains of the now-notorious
international airport, things become stranger and stranger. The drive along
eerily empty ghost freeways into the ruins of inner-city Detroit is an
Alice-like journey into a severely dystopian future. Passing the giant rubber
tyre that dwarfs the nonexistent traffic in ironic testament to the busted
hubris of Motown’s auto-makers, the city’s ripped backside begins to glide past
outside the windows.
Like The Passenger, it’s hard to believe what we’re seeing. The vast, rusting
hulks of abandoned car plants, (some of the largest structures ever built and
far too expensive to pull down), beached amid a shining sea of grass. The
blackened corpses of hundreds of burned-out houses, pulled back to earth by the
green tentacles of nature. Only the drunken rows of telegraph poles marching
away across acres of wildflowers and prairie give any clue as to where teeming
city streets might once have been.
Approaching the derelict shell of downtown Detroit, we see full-grown trees
sprouting from the tops of deserted skyscrapers. In their shadows, the glazed
eyes of the street zombies slide into view, stumbling in front of the car. Our
excitement at driving into what feels like a man-made hurricane Katrina is
matched only by sheer disbelief that what was once the fourth-largest city in
the US could actually be in the process of disappearing from the face of the
earth. The statistics are staggering – 40sq miles of the 139sq mile inner city
have already been reclaimed by nature.
One in five houses now stand empty. Property prices have fallen 80% or more in
Detroit over the last three years. A three-bedroom house on Albany Street is
still on the market for $1.
Unemployment has reached 30%; 33.8% of Detroit’s population and 48.5% of its
children live below the poverty line. Forty-seven per cent of adults in Detroit
are functionally illiterate; 29 Detroit schools closed in 2009 alone.
But statistics tell only one part of the story. The reality of Detroit is far
more visceral. My producer, George Hencken, and I drove around recce-ing our
film, getting out of the car and photographing extraordinary places to film with
mad-dog enthusiasm – everywhere demands to be filmed – but were greeted with
appalled concern by Bradley, our friendly manager, on our return to the hotel.
“Never get out of the car in that area – people have been car-jacked and shot.”
Law and order has completely broken down in the inner city, drugs and
prostitution are rampant and unless you actually murder someone the police will
leave you alone. This makes it great for filming – park where you like, film
what you like – but not so good if you actually live there. The abandoned houses
make great crack dens and provide cover for appalling sex crimes and child
abduction. The only growth industry is the gangs of armed scrappers, who plunder
copper and steel from the ruins. Rabid dogs patrol the streets. All the national
supermarket chains have pulled out of the inner city. People have virtually
nowhere to buy fresh produce. Starbucks? Forget it.
What makes all this so hard to understand is that Detroit was the frontier city
of the American Dream – not just the automobile, but pretty much everything we
associate with 20th-century western civilisation came from there. Mass
production; assembly lines; stop lights; freeways; shopping malls; suburbs and
an emerging middle-class workforce: all these things were pioneered in Detroit.
But the seeds of the Motor City’s downfall were sown a long time ago. The blind
belief of the Big Three in the automobile as an inexhaustible golden goose,
guaranteeing endless streams of cash, resulted in the city becoming reliant on a
single industry. Its destiny fatally entwined with that of the car. The
greed-fuelled willingness of the auto barons to siphon up black workers from the
American south to man their Metropolis-like assembly lines and then treat them
as subhuman citizens, running the city along virtually apartheid lines, created
a racial tinderbox. The black riots of 1943 and 1967 gave Detroit the dubious
distinction of being the only American city to twice call in the might of the US
army to suppress insurrection on its own streets and led directly to the
disastrous so-called white flight of the 50s, 60s and 70s.
The population of Detroit is now 81.6% African-American and almost two-thirds
down on its overall peak in the early 50s. The city has lost its tax base and
cannot afford to cut the grass or light its streets, let alone educate or feed
its citizens. The rest of the US is in denial about the economic catastrophe
that has engulfed Detroit, terrified that this man-made contagion may yet spread
to other US cities. But somehow one cannot imagine the same fate befalling a
city with a predominantly white population.
On many levels Detroit seems to be an insoluble disaster with urgent warnings
for the rest of the industrialised world. But as George and I made our film we
discovered, to our surprise, an irrepressible positivity in the city. Unable to
buy fresh food for their children, people are now growing their own, turning the
demolished neighbourhood blocks into urban farms and kick-starting what is now
the fastest-growing movement across the US. Although the city is still
haemorrhaging population, young people from all over the country are also
flooding into Detroit – artists, musicians and social pioneers, all keen to make
use of the abandoned urban spaces and create new ways of living together.
With the breakdown of 20th-century civilisation, many Detroiters have discovered
an exhilarating sense of starting over, building together a new cross-racial
community sense of doing things, discarding the bankrupt rules of the past and
taking direct control of their own lives. Still at the forefront of the American
Dream, Detroit is fast becoming the first “post-American” city. And amid the
ruins of the Motor City it is possible to find a first pioneer’s map to the
post-industrial future that awaits us all.
So perhaps Detroit can avoid the fate of the lost cities of the Maya and rise
again like the phoenix that sits, appropriately, on its municipal crest. That is
why George and I decided to call our film Requiem for Detroit? – with a big
question mark at the end.
Requiem for Detroit? is on BBC2 on Saturday 13 March at 9pm

Go to: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/mar/10/detroit-motor-city-urban-decline