An outsider compares Detroit to the ruins of Rome

Greg Grandin, a history professor at New York University, recently reflected on Detroit's decay on the Huffington Post. Read the essay here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-g..._b_219607.html

As Grandin tours the ruins of Detroit we know so well, his imagination wanders to the ancient Roman empire. He comes to focus on Henry Ford's "Crystal Palace" in Highland Park, birthplace of the assembly line and the five-dollar-per-day wage. At one time, Grandin says, the Crystal Palace was the nucleus of Henry Ford's ambition to build a new American society.

Here's where I learned something. In the 1920s, Henry Ford established a "colony" in the Amazon basin. "Fordlandia" was a rubber plantation that Henry attempted to turn into a slice of Americana in the heart of the jungle. While Ford invested millions in the Americanization of the immigrants who filled his factories in Detroit, he poured millions into Americanizing the Brazilians who populated Fordlandia. He event hired Albert Kahn to design the public buildings in the colony. The experiment failed and nature eventually reclaimed Fordlandia.

Upon seeing Highland Park for the first time, Grandin is struck by how much it resembles the ruins of Fordlandia. He then connects these two failed enterprises with ancient empires. I'll let you read that for yourself.

I know some people on this forum will perceive Grandin's essay as a "rip" on Detroit, but I think it's worth a lot of thought as we consider where to go from here.

I didn't perceive it as a rip. I think he brings up an important tendency of American aristocrats, and specifically Detroit aristocrats: the tendency to believe that the aristocracy knows best how the rest should live. Take freeways for instance, was it ever really necessary for Detroit to have so many freeways carved into it? And is the city better now that they exist or was it better before they existed? And was the creation of those freeways worth all that was destroyed to build them? Finally, was the decision to create those freeways made democratically, or was it the elite telling the others how to live? I can't believe that there are too many sane people who would vote to have their homes bulldozed for a freeway, so logically I think it was the latter.

Then there is George Jackson and the whole concept of the DEGC, which is essentially more Fordlandia type of thinking. Destroying what was to create what they think should be.

In retrospect, it is pretty clear that the freeways were bad for the city. On the other hand, at the time they were built, I do not believe there was widespread opposition.. Most of the freeways were built before the era of widespread public mobilization against public projects, and those freeways were built with a 90% federal match, and people perceived it as free money and lots of jobs.

And in the 50's, the traffic on the surface streets was pretty bad. Just because something would have been better for the city as an institution doesn't mean it would have been better for all the people living in the city--a lot of them then moved to the suburbs and were happy there, and would not have been able to without the freeways. Worse for the people who remained, perhaps, at least eventually.

A better [[for the city) approach would probably have been spending money on an upgraded rail system, but there wouldn't have been a 90% match for that, nor was that the spirit of the time. Hindsight is usually more accurate than foresight.

We Detroiters and suburbanites have created like ruins of Rome because of BAD LEADERSHIP. If only Detroit have political reformers, then we don't need to talk about these urban problems.

WORD FROM THE STREET PROPHET

for Neda Soltani, a Iranian reformer

Fordlandia in Michigan History Magazine

The Ruins of Fordlândia

where can you write to the guy that wrote the article?