We almost lost Detroit…
Thirty-odd years ago Gil Scott Heron sang about the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor meltdown in “We Almost Lost Detroit”. Thirty years later, if Julien Temple’s excellent documentary for the BBC “Requiem For Detroit” is to be believed, we almost have again.
I was in Detroit briefly in 1984, passing through really, while on a Fly-Drive holiday with my old chum Big Al, He had relatives there and so we stayed with them before heading off further north in Michigan, almost up to the Canadian border at Sault St. Marie. I have quite a lot of photos of the visit, but they are all in the cupboard on slides which I must try and do a digital conversion of sometime.
Although it is some time ago now, some isolated memories remain vivid. I recall that for the self-proclaimed Motor City the freeways were pretty rough. I remember that Big Al and I wandered down the road to a local store to buy some beers to the horror of the (white) locals because we had passed through, or near, a “black” area and who knows what unimaginable horrors could have befallen us. I recall being advised in all seriousness by an ex-pat resident of the then Murder Capital of the USA that she could never live in Edinburgh because it was “too violent” (the Glasgow Weekly News and The Sunday Post, which she had delivered weekly by airmail, assured her that this was so). I also remember the nightly thunderstorms rolling in from the West, washing away some of the humidity that had built up every day.
Temple’s film took us to a very different city, to a company town where collapse of the company had wrought havoc and desolation, fuelled by racial tension. It took us to a city which is relatively rapidly being reclaimed by nature – and which actually reminded me somewhat of the ruins of Washington DC in Logan’s Run. In fact I find that the pace of reclamation is encouragingly quick and, potential ground pollution aside, suggests something positive about natural recovery and human transience. But also, in a twist, it is also a city where at least some locals are reclaiming the former residential areas for urban farms and self-sufficiency.
I took a look around some forums today via Google to see what reaction the programme was getting and I was taken both by how well received it had been as a piece of film making, how sobering people had found it and how some were comparing their experiences of their home environs. There was only one person I found who was giving it a good kicking and he was also the first to admit that he hadn’t actually seen it – make of that what you will.
“Requiem For Detroit” is available for a week on BBC iPlayer or, if you can’t get access to iPlayer, it is well represented on Rapidshare and torrent sites I think.
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