Economist: Weird and wonderful things happening in Detroit

Long, in depth, and elegant piece on Detroit, abandonment, and the art that looks to replace it.

Excerpt:

For such men Detroit's emptiness offers chances that are unavailable elsewhere; it makes the city into a sprawling laboratory, a living stage. Blight has been contained, remedied and reversed in other places. New York was nearly bankrupt in the 1970s. In Washington, DC, new apartments have sprouted like gleaming, angular mushrooms all across the former murder capital of the United States. But New York has (or at least had) banking and finance; Washington has the federal government. Detroit has space, and quiet. It has, as Wallace Stevens said about a snowy landscape, "nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is."

Read the entire article here.
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