It is always a wonder when archaeologists encounter a buried, abandoned city. What … happened? How does a city disappear? What happened to the businesses, the families, the investment?
There were once houses in those empty lots, families, children who roller-skated and rode bicycles in those streets, dressed-up and went trick-or-treating.
Raised in Detroit, I always read news of the city’s continuing disintegration with a sort of morbid fascination, and encounter pictures like those above with disbelief. A once-great city is dying in front of the world’s eyes; archaeologists have begun to organize field trips, thinking to learn just what the stages of a city’s disappearance are.
But here is something else that’s interesting, too; economic life is stirring in the ruins. Local government is so weak and ineffectual that a sort of frontier anarchism has taken hold. People are planting crops on the empty lot next door; there is a guy who makes a living trapping raccoon and pheasant; folk are setting-up small service and retail businesses on their porches and in abandoned buildings without bothering with licenses, regulations, sales taxes; cheap properties are attracting the frugal and the adventurous.
After 50-some years and untold tens of millions of dollars on planners and bulldozers and master plans and unkept promises, a new Detroit might be emerging as those who live there take matters into their own hands.
Wouldn’t it be a stitch if it turned out that the utter collapse of its government ended-up being the thing that saved Detroit?
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