Rethinking Detroit’s abandoned places

The current issue of the Economist Magazine has one of the best articles on Detroit I’ve seen in some time from an outsider’s perspective. And it’s even uplifting.

Entitled “The Art of Abandonment,” the unsigned piece includes the (by now) obligatory vivid descriptions of a shrinking city, its hard economic fall years in the making, and the physical accompaniment of boarded-up homes and businesses. But there’s a twist here. A colorful twist.

The story documents the lemons-to-lemonade “Object Orange,” a project of mostly non-Detroiter artists who aim to draw attention to blighted properties near major thoroughfares by dabbing them with splotches of colorful paint.

From the article there’s this factoid:

Object Orange has plenty of houses to choose from: nearly one-third of the city’s housing stock – more than 100,000 homes – is vacant.

A similar project, this one executed by one Tyree Guyton among others, has done much the same thing along a stretch of Heidelberg Street in east Detroit. Guyton has even transformed his own mother’s home into what’s now known as the “Dotty Wotty House.” The hardscrabble neighborhood has been transformed by Guyton into “a beguiling, whimsical and challenging art installation.”

Again, from the article:

When described, the work may sound overbearing and obvious; in person it is magical.

The Heidelberg Project is dubbed by the writer as “abstract advocacy” – an artistic response to the abandoned properties of present-day Detroit.

The story also touches on the potential of urban farms and maybe even urban wind farms as the city’s population has shrunk from nearly 2 million in 1950 to about 800,000 today. The result, of course, is a lot of vacant, or nearly-vacant, land.

But that’s not necessarily reason for despair.

Near the end of the article, there’s this upbeat conclusion:

Detroit’s emptiness offers chances that are unavailable elsewhere; it makes the city into a sprawling laboratory, a living stage.

That’s obviously not a solution to joblessness or all the other dark clouds hovering over the Motor City these days, but it may at least qualify as a silver lining.