Detroitism. What does “ruin porn” tell us about the motor city, ourselves, other American cities? Photograph by Yves Marchan and Romain Meffre courtesy Steidl. Red Dawn 2, the forthcoming sequel to the nineteen eighties B-movie about a Soviet occupation of America, was shot last year in downtown Detroit. A long-abandoned modernist skyscraper coincidentally undergoing demolition served as a backdrop for battle scenes between American guerrillas and the Communist occupiers, now Chinese. For weeks, Chinese propaganda posters fluttered in the foreground of the half-destroyed office building, whose jagged entrails were visible through the holes opened by the wrecking ball. A pedestrian routinely bumped into Asian-American extras with Michigan accents and fake Kalashnikovs, while a parking garage played the role of a Communist police station.
“Do you have any books with pictures of abandoned buildings?” The city has been a bellwether of each major urban crisis since World War II. The Detroit Lament. Tianjin Eco-City / Surbana Urban Planning Group. We spotted this new super green city development model over on Inhabitat that will support 350,000 residents in Tianjin. The model places a strong emphasis on landscaping as residential towers rise amidst the parks, promenades and valleys that create the plan’s primary network.
Designed by Surbana Urban Planning Group, the scheme divides the city into seven sectors which vary in terms of landscape and programmatic offerings. More images and more about the plan after the break. Organized into seven parts, the plan will boast a Lifescape, an Eco-Valley, a Solarscape, an Urbanscape, a Windscape, an Earthscape and Eco-Corridors that will offer residents a different landscape ranging from the stepped, terraced greenery of the Earthscape to the more futuristic soil-shaped mounds of the Lifescape.
While some areas, such as the Urbanscape, will be more compact with higher density buildings, the plan also provides areas for smaller developments, such as its Windscape section. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth: an Urban History. Retrofitting suburbia, chapter two: A Randhurst update.