DownTown - Detroit

At some point a man came up to me who wanted to show me his neighborhood. I drove around with him for a few days, and he carried a one-and-a-half liter cup of beer with him the whole time. We were in an area where many houses had been torn down - set on fire by the police at some point, so that no drug dealers could occupy them. Now grass is growing in the empty lots. People live among the empty lots with nothing to do all day long. They hang out, take drugs, listen to music, play horseshoes, and go to church, where they are given something to eat. It is like after a natural catastrophe: they have survived, but they have not escaped. People are too poor to leave Detroit, and so they wait there, although they know that nothing more is going to happen for them. I did not meet anyone who had a concrete idea about how his or her life would be in ten years. Instead, I came away asking myself how we will live in ten years and whether Detroit is an exception or an image of the future.

I did also go to the suburbs, where the whites live. Small, boring developments, where each house looks like the next, with a strip of grass in front that is mowed on Saturdays. Everything seemed intact, but it could have been anywhere. The urban core, what makes a city unique and gives it character, is disintegrating. The airplane I took to Detroit flew right over the city. From above you didn’t get a sense of the destruction. Everything just seemed somehow dead. I thought, well, that’s just how it is with an unfamiliar place. In the beginning it doesn’t say much, but after a while you see it through different eyes, and that’s the beauty of traveling. My return flight was different. Although I had gotten to know the city and a few of its inhabitants, when I took off, I had the feeling I was abandoning them.