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| Detroit. Philipp Oswalt - "Shrinking Cities Volume 1: International Research" Germany, 2015 |
"Despite appearances otherwise, the postindustrial city and speculative settlement actually have a great deal in common. Both are characterized by overscaled infrastructures and edifices, planned and built for a population that failed to materialize. Both are characterized by vast areas of emptiness adjacent to complete, if underoccupied, facilities, creating an overall sense of incompletion and abandonment. Both are characterized by monofunctionality, typically in the form of single-use activity zones. Both are characterized by significant residual spaces between infrastructure and urban fabric that have melded into an undefined quasi-urban membrane indescribable by the traditional language of urban design and planning. And finally, both are characterized by a strange, unintentional hybridity where natural systems increasingly co-opt the unoccupied gaps and voids in urban form.
Perhaps the most fundamental difference between the two paradigms can be found in their duration. One condition took half a century to be built up and another three decades or more to fail. The other condition was conceived, designed, and deployed in less than a decade and now sits incomplete and only partially occupied, if at all. One has a cultural history, while the other is simply a transactional product."
Christopher Marcinkoski
Princeton Architectural Press. New York, 2015