I love American cities. I love everything about them, from the gargantuan sophisticated metropolises of the east coast to the anywherescapes of small-town mid-west and further to the low-rise sunburnt cities of California. I love the vertical landscape of New York; the sprawling weird motorways of Los Angeles; the early skyscrapers of Chicago; the kitsch of Miami and Las Vegas. I love the ambition, the creativity, the concrete and steel, the architecture of Gropius and Mies and SOM, Venturi’s Main Street, the engineered beauty of the Golden Gate and Brooklyn Bridges; the unexpected openness of the gridiron street patterns where vistas spill in between blocks revealing open skies and views far into the distance. Gazing westward from Europe, America’s urban places always seemed like the apotheosis of what a city should mean.
Addicted as I was by my fantasies of metropolitan life I have been equally consumed by recent coverage of the decline of these same places. Once grandiose landscapes of the Midwest, constructed by the market are now doomed by the same forces; people and industry leave, and buildings are simply left to crumble. Without the intervention of any form of state aid to keep downtown alive it is slowly reclaimed by plants and wildlife. Of all American cities beset by subprime failure and population shrinkage, Detroit is the archetype: an urban landscape swiftly is turning into a sedimented archaeology of the rise and collapse of America’s motor industry. And indeed, it has received extensive coverage in this regard: a new book out of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre's photos of the city in ruins was profiled recently in the Guardian, while Julian Temple’s excellent Requiem for Detroit (2010) also explored that city’s collapse.
I recently went to Baltimore, a city which has witnessed a long-term population decline of many American cities, but has the unique distinction of this having been captured and fictionalised for mass-consumption in high-school geography class-meets-cop drama TV show The Wire. And while there was much that was recognisable off the show, it was of course a far more interesting place that the mini-series can portray. The Mount Vernon area just north of downtown formed street after street of flat fronted brick buildings, built in a neo-classical style in the early nineteenth-century. Indeed, it could have been London; if picture of one on them turned up in Summerson’s Georgian London you wouldn’t blink, apart from the fact that these areas are strangely bare of people or life (more on that later). The downtown area is a strange mix of 1980s and 1990 shiny glass anonymous highrises and beautiful early skyscrapers. These monuments to America’s golden age are Romanesque or gothic cathedrals at top and bottom with miles of windows elongating an otherwise recognisable architectural form and making something completely new. The inner harbour has been expensively refurbished in the last decade. Its a reassuring non-place of granite pavements, chain shops, and America’s largest aquarium. Surprisingly little of the old warehouses have been incorporated into the new generic spaces. It made me feel awkward. In this distance you can see Baltimore’s diminishing dock area: hard constructivist lines of machinery and metal against an empty sky and reflected in the purple water. Nevertheless, it’s a city full of problems. The city is strangely empty; downtown is full of offices, but few people or shops or restaurants to attract them to spend time in these places. Indeed, white flight has clearly taken place on a massive scale: street after street of empty boarded up houses encircle the central business district, indicating urban collapse on a scale incomparable with anything I’ve seen in Britain. Policing is aggressive. Large cameras, marked out by blue lights are suspended above crossroads at ‘problem’ junctions, indicating an intrusive, aggressive, even colonial approach to policing. It was something I wasn’t expecting in the Land of the Free. I loved it though; it was beautiful and strange and with its mix of architectural styles, jarring of land uses, and clashes of wealth and dereliction, it was just like I imagined an American city should be. I admit it, I was a bit of a tourist, I went Wire sightseeing.
Mount Vernon, Baltimore
So I wanted to write this post about the rise and decline of the great American city (to take Jacobs’s phrase and use it in a way she never expected). But when I googled Requiem for Detroit I didn’t get ecstatic reviews of the film’s cinematography, but rather a Michigan newspaper headline entitled ‘Detroit Cliche Watchdog: Britons continue their obsession with Detroit's ruin.’ Rats. Nothing worse than discovering via a google search (of all things!) that you thoughts are a bit hackneyed and obvious. And what do you know (some further googling ensues...)—Julian Temple is English, Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre come from France, while I have only been to two places in America (I lived in LA as a child, and now retuned to Baltimore as an adult); all my knowledge of everywhere in between comes not from experience from gawping at documentaries and sitting in libraries in Oxford. So what does this mean? Why do we in Europe marvel at the decline of the once great American cities of the manufacturing belt? Reflected in the water of Baltimore’s declining dockside and in the glass of Detroit’s abandoned towerblocks, what do we see here in Europe?
