AM291 Detroit and the Cyclical Transformation of our Environments

Wednesday, 29 March 2017

6:30 - 7:45pm

Cost: Free event

During most of the 20th century, Detroit was one of the wealthiest and most innovative boom towns in the United States - a thriving metropolis that in the post-war decades embodied America’s economic and military might.  Since the city’s peak in the 1970s, entire communities have undergone a process of desertification and abandonment; its population has shrunk by more than fifty percent, leaving forty square miles of empty land.

The abandoned, desolate spaces that have come to define Detroit demonstrate how territories are continually changing, transformed by natural causes or by human activity. Those who remain in inner-Detroit are the leftovers of the exodus, living amid the shells of industry; of entertainment, near an abandoned drive-in; yet continuing to decorate  -- even dream!

The tension between nature’s gradual takeover and city’s stubborn refusal to surrender is a paroxysm evident throughout the city as Detroit struggles to reinvent itself, and hopefully even find space for its original inhabitants – the beavers.  Our speaker will demonstrate through his photographs the fate of Detroit as an example of his interest in the cyclical transformations of our environment which occur all over the globe.