Earlier this week, I was handed a hefty book with photos of classic suburban American family homes. The tome described how Detroit has been so ravaged by economic disaster in recent years that it has become an epicentre for “ruin porn”: if you search for images of the city online, you invariably find endless pictures of boarded-up houses.
But Detroit is fighting back. In 329 pages, the book, known as The Detroit Blight Removal Task Force Plan and produced by a public-private coalition, sets out a goal to “intervene” in 84,000 property lots — or one-third of the city’s total. The aim is quite literally to clean the place up and remove urban blight, at a cost of $850m.
“The phrase ‘ruin porn’ did not emerge accidentally [but because] tens of thousands of well-built homes, commercial buildings and clean vacant lots have morphed into an unprecedented amount of ugly blight,” it declares. “There is no need to sugar-coat this calamity any more.”