Derelict Landscapes: Documenting Urbicide

Auto Body Plant, Detroit

Its hard not to notice the circulation of apocalyptic images of the city: abandoned suburbs, boarded up rowhouses, (the ‘vacants’ as they were called on The Wire, where they were used to house the city’s dead), shuttered factories, and empty storefronts.

Florida Foreclosures

Over twenty years ago, Marshall Berman coined the term ‘urbicide’ to catalogue the wholesale destruction of his South Bronx neighbourhood, a place where ‘more than 300,000 people fled in the 1970s as their homes were …destroyed.’ In the 1970s he says, the South Bronx were the greatest ruins outside of Beruit:

‘these stricken people belong to one of the largest shadow communities in the world, victims of a great crime without a name. Let us give it a name  now he says, and calls it ‘urbicide, the murder of a city.‘

Cincinnati

Erich Hanxleden sent in a striking photo essay from Time maganize which documents Detroit’s ‘beautiful, horrible decline’, or we could say, the urbicide the city. Today, we bear collective witnessness to the methodical murder of one of the most powerful cities in the history of 2oth century America. What is the social significance in documenting Detroit’s landscapes of dereliction (along with others in Cleveland, Braddock, suburban Minneapolis, Florida, etc)? How do these landscapes reveal the world of globalized economies? Whose voices are absent as we document the urbicide of US cities and suburbs?