To speak in a perhaps too-reductionist manner, the urban environment is best seen as the site of a struggle against an ever-encroaching natural environment - a city is ultimately an effort to carve out a space for commerce and leisure. We expect a certain amount of permanence from urban environments, and tend to view any unmoderated yielding of it with a sense of discomfort (this is distinct from mediated attempts at combining urban and natural environments or maintaing natural environments in the midst of encroaching urban sprawl, like, say, High Park, Central Park or Rouge Park). I was always a bit taken aback by the notion, for example, that the Roman Forum, heart of the ancient capital, was for centuries little more than a debris field which require excavation.
Understanding how nature gives way to a city isn't terribly difficult to understand; but how, precisely, does a city give way to nature? It's apparently happening in Detroit. Check out the photos at detroitblog, which show entire neighbourhoods being overtaken by plants and wildlife - even, bizarre as it seems, abandoned downtown skyscrapers being reclaimed.
Actually, Detroit's not the worst I've seen, stunning as it is.
For overall decrepitude, abandonment, and fine example of urban prairie overtaking what was once a city I don't think there's anything in North America that can quite compare to East St. Louis.
There's a pretty good tour here:
http://www.builtstlouis.net/eaststlouis/eaststl01.html
But even that doesn't quite capture the haunting awfulness of the place.
Posted by: Kevin Jaeger | May 19, 2007 at 11:51 PM