History: Capital of the 20th Century, Detroit Disassembeled

"There is no culture — for lack of a better word — no context of public memory and social expectation that would bind together all that the city contains.

What does it add up to, all this abandonment of lives and buildings, neighborhoods and property? It doesn’t seem to add up to anything, other than the decontextualized spectacle itself and the demographic souvenir-hunting opportunities it provides. This city is never coming back; whatever happens next will be without urban precedent because the context of city no longer applies in this place where history has finally run out. And so the reason we come to Detroit — immigrants, tourists, artists, journalists alike — is to engage a fantasy about how we can always walk away from the past, from the now blown promise of an erstwhile prosperity that was once made real for generations of Americans. There’s probably not a better place in this country, maybe in the world, for this kind of work."

- Jerry Herron

More from the Article: The Forgetting Machine



NYTimes Article: Dismantling Detroit