Geography Of War And Ruin Porn

I saw the movie "Belle Époque" not too long after it left US theaters. My only vivid memory of watching the film is how removed the story is from war-torn Spain. More often than not, actual battles are geographically isolated. The economic rationing is real enough, everywhere. But the devastation that comes to define a country during war is a small percentage of the total land area. Bottom line, military conflict dominated Spain at that point in history.

Our sense of place is always an abstraction, a small piece of a region full of variety. One can easily find an exception to the rule, no matter where you are. Our sense of place is also a mythology, the stories that populate terra incognita. Myths are debunked, but stubbornly durable. The line between abstraction and myth is fuzzy.

This isn't a post about Spain or war. It is about Detroit:

Artists of yore made pilgrimages to Greece, Italy and Egypt to paint the remains of ancient civilizations. Touchstones of greatness past, those ruins were easy metaphors for the march of time, mortality and the transience of power.

Apart from, say, the cliffside villages of Anasazi Indians and ghost-town relics of the Gold Rush, the New World was, well, too new for such things. We were busy looking forward anyway, so sure of our supremacy that even the deterioration of Rust Belt cities didn’t give us too much pause -- until the Great Recession let the air out of the balloon.

Now we recognize those cities are our ruins, and Detroit, once an exemplar of American ingenuity, middle-class success and industrial might, is the biggest metaphor of all. Although the crown of the magnificent Fisher Building still gleams on the skyline, the streets down below are like a gap-toothed crone, pocked with empty lots and crumbling houses. Schools and offices are shuttered. Nature is reclaiming this once bustling metropolis.

Before we dismiss the above as another piece of ruin porn, I'd like to write about New Orleans. One could visit post-Katrina and wonder what the fuss is about. The same could be said about pre-Katrina New Orleans. In the late 1990s, I traveled to the Big Easy for the Jazz Festival. I stayed at the Youth Hostel, which was on the edge of some dicey neighborhoods. Of course, I had to see the taboo locales with my own eyes. Just two or three blocks away from the famous and beautiful Garden District is what looked to be a war zone. I've witnessed a lot of the neglected parts of the United States. This was easily the most shocking. You would never know it was there, so close as you strolled down St. Charles.

Every city has a wrong-side-of-the-tracks. Every city has well-to-do mansions and exclusive parts of town. Which image defines your city?

In Detroit, Henry Ford has yielded way to ruin porn. Urban poverty and empty residential blocks don't capture the imagination of outsiders. Crumbling palaces of wealth do. Imagine every other house in the Garden District abandoned, St. Charles overwhelmed with kudzu. The 9th Ward doesn't matter unless you have reason to go there.

We can accentuate the positive. That doesn't change Cleveland or St. Louis:

Over and over, speakers pointed out that while cities are efficient, many of their urban centers are losing population. One city discussed has lost half its population since 1950, is a declining center of corporate headquarters, has thousands of largely vacant land despite the presence of a renowned children’s hospital, a famed symphony and a lively downtown restaurant scene. St Louis? No, Cleveland. ...

... No conference about cities can ignore the enormous problems of Detroit and the efforts to revive or at least preserve parts of it. Rick Tetzeli, a Time Inc. editor, described his company’s purchase of a house in Detroit as a base for reporting all aspects of city life. He said Time Inc. paid $99,000 for a six-bedroom house in a neighborhood that still has the vacant, burned-out storefronts from the riots in 1967.

I'd bet I could find a similar deal in Columbia Heights, a neighborhood of Washington, DC. So, DC and Detroit are in the same boat? No. One has a rotten core and the other does not. Time doesn't know the first thing about urban economic geography. The legacy of the MLK riots tells us little about the macroeconomic shocks pummeling Detroit today.

Neither does the legacy of Belle Époque. That you can find wealth and a cosmopolitan disposition in Detroit is not a rebuke of ruin porn. A temple to the Robber Barons stands empty. Nothing replaces it. The site becomes a relic, like the Acropolis in Athens and symbol of what Greece used to be.

Athens is still there. Detroit is still there. Both places matter a whole lot less. Neither is willing to bury the past. Thus, ruin porn rules.