When The Specials recorded “Ghost Town”, after the 1981 riots, it was a eulogy to the economic destruction of Thatcherism that had razed large swathes of industrial Britain to the ground. But it could just as easily be applied to Detroit today as few cities anywhere have suffered the level of de-industrialisation that Detroit has been through. Once the car capital of the world, now it is a car lot of empty buildings, a memoriam to the American dream that was capitalism.
Julien Temple’s perceptive film, Requiem for Detroit, plotted the rise and fall of the dream that turned into a nightmare. With slick editing and a soundtrack that owed much to Detroit itself, Temple showed how the city was once the embodiment of everything American; a wealth founded on the car giants, first Henry Ford, then General Motors and Chrysler. Cars rolled off the production line as Americans grew rich and peaceful suburbs sprang up.
In the 1930s, it was the scene of some of America’s most bitter industrial conflict as police shot dead strikers and protesters. Then, in the 1950s and ’60s as the car became the consumer must-have, the industry attracted thousands of blacks from the south to its de-segregated production lines. But with this came a sociological disaster, as a black-white fault line was cut across the city.
Detroit became the birthplace of Motown music and then, in 1967, serious rioting resulted in 43 dead and 2,000 buildings being burned to the ground. They were not “race” riots, insisted one interviewee, but riots against poverty and inequality. Then came the hike in oil prices and the gas-guzzling saloons of the American car giants were out of favour. Today, Detroit has been compared to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, but without the public sympathy, political concern and aid. It has just been left to rot.
An urban archaeologist takes us around the shells of buildings; once magnificent apartment blocks now with no residents, crumbling technical colleges and designer-schools with no students, factories with no workers, thousands of homes with no families. Even a hotel, once the palatial quarters for visiting black musician who were not allowed to stay in the segregated down-town hotels, mourns for its past. In the main hall, an old grand piano rests on one leg. To think that Duke Ellington, Oscar Peterson and Fats Waller may once have tinkled on its now dusty keyboard. The first Ford production plant is a tumbling shell of a building. This is a ghost town, a settlement whose inhabitants have fled. A man sadly picks his way through the dilapidated home of a school friend remembering the fun they had there as kids.
The population of car city has tumbled from two million to just 800,000 so that the rush hour has become little more than a pleasant Sunday afternoon drive. The six lane highways and freeways are empty, yet in the midst of this apocalyptic gloom lies some hope. The wastelands are being returned to agriculture as a new agrarian revolution springs up. The prairie is back. Production-line workers have become farmers now cultivating their homemade crops. Elsewhere, artists have occupied the rundown homes turning them into living constructivist art. Whether or not this can be a realistic model for a post-industrial society remains open to debate. Who pays for the infrastructure and the services? But at least there is a new dream where not so long ago there was simply unemployment, drugs and despair.
