Detroit Ruin of a City

Detroit, Ruin of a City clip from Michael Chanan on Vimeo.

Rebecca Solnit

Brutalitat in Stein (1961)

Detroit: Making it Better for You (2000)

Detroit: Making It Better for You from Kyong Park on Vimeo.

Text from Rethinking Marxism 15: 3, 404-5:

A project of International Center for Urban Ecology. Directed by Kyong Park. Composed, edited and narrated by Joshua Pearson [9:25min] 2000.

Detroit: Making It Better for You is a 2-channel video, showing a gritty tapestry of images on the destruction of Detroit, the city of the war between the sustainability of the local community against the greed of the global economy. Through its “driveby-shooting” technique—emblematic to the mythology of Detroit as the “Motor City”—the video offers street level views of the urban clashes between the inner city emptiness and suburban bliss.

Robinson in Ruins (2010)

• Peter Bradshaw's review in The Guardian
• Brian Dillon's piece on Keiller, also from The Guardian
• Spotlight | Robinson in Ruins (Patrick Keiller, UK), Cinema Scope
• 'The Future of Landscape: Patrick Keiller,' interview with Andrew Stevens in 3AM
• Farihah Zaman, 'Home Fires,' Reverse Shot

Into Eternity (2010)

The focus of Michael Madsen's new documentary Into Eternity -- about the inconceivable task of securing nuclear waste deep underground for thousands of years -- is Onkalo in Finland. The Americans have a similar facility called the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) located near Carlsbad, New Mexico. Not least among the problems faced by designers of such places is how to signpost a site for curious visitors poking around the site in, say, 10,000 years time.

 

Landscape of Thorns, concept by Michael Brill and drawing by Safdar
Abidi, from Marking the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant for 10,000 Years



'Like the gaze of the exorcist, the gaze of the pollution-plagued contemporary is directed at something invisible. The risk society marks the dawning of a speculative age in everyday perception and thought. [...] Not until the step to cultural risk consciousness is everyday thought and imagination removed from its moorings in the world of the visible. In the struggle over risks of modernization we are no longer concerned with the specific value of that which appears to us in perception. What becomes the subject of controversy as to its degree of reality is instead what everyday consciousness does not see, and cannot perceive: radioactivity, pollutants and threats in the future' (Ulrich Beck, Risk Society 73)

• Into Eternity film website
• U.S. Department of Energy Waste Isolation Pilot Plant
• Expert Judgment on Markers To Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion Into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant [Sandia National Laboratories report PDF]
• Charles C. Reith and N. Timothy Fisher, “Transuranic Waste Disposal: The WIPP Project,” in Charles C. Reith and Bruce M. Thomson, eds., Deserts as Dumps?: The Disposal of Hazardous Materials in Arid Ecosystems (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992) 303-318.
• Tom Vanderbilt, Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002) 185-191.
• Peter C. van Wyck, Signs of Danger: Waste, Trauma, and Nuclear Threat (University of Minnesota Press, 2004)
• Peter C. van Wyck, “American Monument: The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant,” in Atomic Culture: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Scott C. Zeman and Michael A. Amundson, eds. (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2004) 149-172.