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"Detroit - prairie and pavement" is a forthcoming book and exhibition of photographs on the urban anthropology of Detroit. Photographed by Ian Brown.
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Detroit was once the fourth largest city in the United States. It has lost over half it's population over the last 50 years. Unemployment is staggering ; there over thousands of abandoned houses and vast areas of the city are a virtual urban wasteland.
Hulking old factories and plants lie in ruins. The natural environment has slowly reclaimed whole city blocks and vacant swaths of former city streets giving rise to the term "urban prairie". Pheasants, coyotes and even deer are seen roaming in parts of the Detroit environs. Services have been cut, 911 wait times are approaching an hour and the city has taken on a sense of desperate and lawless desolation.
However, there are glimmers of hope for some renewal. Detroit offers an opportunity to exercise some ideas on urban thinking that would never be possible in another city. New approachs to impossible circumstances mean Detroit can be the proving grounds for new urbanism, much the way it was for the automotive industry that built the city in the first place. Will Detroit rise up again? or will it slide further into decline? For now it is caught somewhere between prairie and pavement.
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- ian brown
- Toronto Photographer Ian Brown's style has been described as raw, engaging and intimate. Visit www.ianbrownphotography.com for more.
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