OUT OF detroit: top frauded music artists [ph.2]

OUT OF detroit: soul seduction hits [ph.2]

soulseduction is a vienna-based record store with a wide range of music on cd, vinyl and dvd. they own several stores in vienna as well as it is also possible to buy music on-line.
we took the webpage of this store as an interface for our research on detroit's music landscape and it's representation in other countries and always in comparison with our choice of cities.



we were looking how many hits we would get. if we typed for example detroit in the search engine of the homepage, we got over 1000 hits. for much larger cities like tokyo or mexico city we got much fewer hits.

OUT OF detroit: motown and techno years [ph. 2]

We continue the look at music out of Detroit.
It is remarkable how the decline in population of the city of Detroit corresponds with the two main waves of Detroit music, first motown from the sixties, and then techno from the eighties.

NB// We have now added a guestbook to the blog, and invite everybody to engage and contribute!

OUT OF detroit: music [phase 2]

detroit based techno labels network

detroit based techno labels headquarters

links of detroit based labels

ABOUT detroit: media attention profile [phase 2]

We continue to post parts of our work from the second phase of the project. For more up-to-date information and posts, please be patient. . Among other things, we will soon bring some stories and images from our recent Detroit DE-tour.
Click on images for larger versions, cause Shrinky might have something to tell you!

COMPARING detroit: choice of cities [phase 2]

intro phase 2

in phase 1 we have been approaching towards shrinking cities in a very general way, asking first questions about the nature and phenomenons of shrinking cities, in phase 2 we were developing our basic views in a wider perspective.

if detroit's media-landscape was the key to unfold our approach, we had to define the media-landmarks: in addition to the four corporate "media money machines" television, music, film, and videogames, we were also interested in p2p file sharing, music fraud, music labels, detroit based brands, as well as detroit's media attention profile.

Ethan Zuckerman, a research fellow at the berkman center for internet and society, has developed the method for mapping the media attention given to all the worlds countries, and showing which countries are underexposed in the world media. he helped us by adapting the script to map world cities instead. then he run one test for us, giving us spreadsheets for our graphs. we decided it would be interesting to compare detroit to cities on a global scale.

therefore detroit's data would always be compared with the largest metropolitan areas or cities on each continent, lesser focused booming cities, and a choice of ghost-towns and shrinking cities.

the result show a clear disparity between us/canadian cities and developing world cities. this can be taken into account for by making clear categories and groups of cities.

"google hits/news-items/google-news"

the results for the media attention spreadsheets of cities are based on a set of search engines:

1. BBC - all BBC news sources for the past 5-6 years
2. altavista, google - a search of the 4500 or so news sources covered by news.google.com and news.altavista.com usually the last 14-30 days
3. AP, reuters - search of the AP and reuters newsfeeds for the past 14 days
4. NY post - search of the NYpost newspaper for the past few years
5. NYT,NYTIlong - search of NY times for one week, 90 days respectively
6. washington post - search of the last 14 days of the washington post
7. CNN - all CNN news sources of the past 4 years
8. daypop - search of weblogs indexed by daypop over the last 14 days.

after the first try with the analyzing model for our choice of cities, as mentioned above, we were recommended by Ethan Zuckerman to do the next "run" with a choice of about 200 cities to get more precise results...

simcity 4: shrinking city expansion pack [phase 1]

method diagrams/overlays [phase 1]

population-segregation /air pollution - overlay

more pollution
less people?


population-development/ movie releases - overlay

less population
more movies?


population-development / intitiatives established - overlay

less population
more initiatives?

idea of interaction [phase 1]

observing shrinking cities


artist mark lombardi


networks inhabit media space


observation instead of interaction.
revelation instead of planning.
scanning instead of projecting.

yes, in shrinking cities, the population is decreasing. but is physical population the only parameter that should be considered? a lot of processes are generated by the decrease of population. are those increasing virtual processes maybe as important? can cities develop stronger identities if they allow themselves to create their own success formulas? is the uniformity of world success-cities formed by the common consensus in their ambitions?

our protagonists are interest and curiosity, our resources are all sorts of public available data. our favourite local actor would be detroitsynergy.org. linking the data in new ways and making processes and relations visible by using diagrams and maps. the artist mark lombardi gathered public available data and simply relating them, seemingly independent events could be understood as dependent actions.

merging: can we tie urban processes to fields and topics it is normally not associated with? corporate structure, marketing and branding are de-territorialized fields with remarkable similar objectives and structure as cities. can the city loosen its dependency to its own location and enter new networks by picking up strategies from other disciplines?

approach [phase 1]

like a heartbeat

our approach is about movement and change as basic features of a city's development. if we consider change not as linear and movement as alternation of contraction and detraction, a city develops in cycles, like a heart-beat or the changing volume of the lungs or self-organizing structures.

we used to be shrinking cities

if we look at other cities, we can see that shrinking is usually a temporary process, a phase in a city's life-span, that turns around either by conceivable (manaus) or nonconceivable (vienna) developments. if even ghosttowns have an afterlife, can a city boom without an increase in physical density? can we define a city by other means and physical parameters like population?

dead concepts

the personal initiative and visions inherent in all do-it-yourself-cultures, can never be conceived from outside its natural biotope. but its growth could get extra stimulus from clever use/research of the mediaspace it inhabits. with detroit as a casestudy / illustration, it is possible to propose alternative strategies, that sees the exodus from the city core as a process to manipulate / intensify, instead of just denying it / fighting it down? intensification is not a dogma. the shrinking city has more options than the booming city. successful cities soon become prisoners of their own marketing and branding efforts. how to avoid the shrinking and diluted city-core to develop into an ersatz-city / theme park for the dwellers of suburbia? is gentrification a law of nature? can dead structures or concepts have an afterlife in detroit?

abstract concept [phase 1]

abstract concept

instead of evaluating whether shrinking is good or bad, whether fighting or supporting it, we want to look at the shrinking-phenomena in a very pragmatic way, considering parameters beyond income, unemployment and demographic change. is it possible to find out what the mechanisms of a shrinking city like detroit are and how shrinking detroit works? observation instead of interaction? revelation instead of planning? scanning instead of projecting?

some info on bad-architects.network

bad-architects.network is an European emerging internet-based network of young architects, founded in 2004. Currently it has seven members: Ursula Faix and Paul Burgstaller BAD-INN, Austria; Damien Guiot BAD-LIL, France; Lorenzo Bini BAD-MIL, Italy, Anders Melsom and Kathrine Nyhus BAD-OSL, Norway as well as Robert Wurbs BAD-SZG, Austria.
The teams vary from project to project: e.g. the project DE-tro-IT was developed by BAD-INN and BAD-OSL. A different project, library competition was developed by all four cells (BAD-INN, BAD-LIL, BAD-MIL and BAD-OSL).
Each cell is also acting independently on a regional/local basis with own projects, whereas a BAD-project has to be developed by at least two cells. Sometimes the people working together have never met physically, also Ethan Zuckerman was an internet acquaintance to us. Quote from his weblog: (http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ethan): Like most cyberutopians, I’ve sung the praises of global collaboration more than once. But it’s pretty rare that I actually find myself in such collaborations. Publishing research on my blog seems to increase the chance of this sort of serendipity…so expect to see lots more in the future…"
bad-architects.network tries to find experimental ways of collaboration which should reinforce the exchange between architects. We want to collaborate with people, because we are convinced about them, not because they are living close to us.

clipped from DE-tro-IT press release -jan 05

DE-tro-IT phase 2 overview

Shrinking cities are a global phenomenon. Cities in the United States have also to deal with population decrease as well as cities in Europe or unexpectedly in Asia. In context of the international interdisciplinary architecture competition "Shrinking Cities – Reinventing Urbanism" (http://www.shrinkingcities.com/), our project DE-tro-IT has the ambition to bring a more complex view on shrinking cities by focusing on the immaterial Detroit and the city’s rank in the global media landscape. It has been elected among nine winning projects.

Our entry "DE-tro-IT" deals with the fact that other parameters than population figures determine a city. In order to get a better picture of Detroit we compared Detroit with other cities in five categories (same size agglomerations, largest city on each continent, boomtowns, shrinking US-cities and ghost towns). With the help of Ethan Zuckerman’s GAP tools (http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ethan) which he adapted for our cities we could determine Detroit’s media attention in global context. Always in comparison with our choice of five categories cities we researched on Detroit’s music scene which peaked twice: during the sixties’ Motown Years and right now with the vivid Techno and Hip Hop scene. Detroit’s music scene was actually booming when the population already declined. According to the movie scene, besides movies with shooting locations in Detroit, the image of Detroit in the movies was of particular interest to us, as well as the years when movie making started, vanished and restarted again. Another topic of our research was Detroit brands. A lot of Detroit brands emerged during the fifties and sixties and died during the last three decades. However there is this phenomenon of retro brands which reappear, having an afterlife. Out of this research we are trying to develop a "Shrinking Cities Index", and monitoring the media attention over a span of time. We plan to present the developed project in a webpage as well as the Leipzig exhibition.

The Shrinking Cities project

Starting Point /// Whether in the USA, Britain, or Belgium, Finland, Italy, Russia, Kazakhstan, or China: everywhere, cities are shrinking. The dramatic development in eastern Germany since 1989, which has led to more than a million empty apartments and to the abandoning of countless industrial parks and social and cultural facilities, has proven to be no exception, but a general pattern of our civilization. Shrunken cities contradict the image, familiar since the Industrial Revolution, of the "boomtown", a big city characterized by constant economic and demographic growth. Shrunken cities spur a reconsideration not only of traditional ideas of the European city, but also of the future development of urban worlds. The drastic changes in cities caused by shrinking thus present not only an economic and social, but also a cultural challenge. Urban shrinking can hardly be affected by city planning, and it brings numerous problems. New types of cities arise; we do not yet have ways of thinking or of using their specific character.

The Project /// Shrinking Cities, a three-year initiative project of Germany's Federal Cultural Foundation, seeks to expand Germany's city-planning debate - until now concentrated on questions of demolishing surplus apartments and improving residential quarters - to address new questions and perspectives. The project also places developments in eastern Germany in an international context, involving various artistic, design, and research disciplines in the search for strategies for action. The emphases of the research and exhibition project, Shrinking Cities, are, first, an international study of processes of shrinking (first project phase) and, second, the development of strategies for action for eastern Germany (second project phase).

International Study /// Since 2002, four local interdisciplinary teams have been commissioned to study and document urban shrinking processes in the urban regions of Detroit (USA), Manchester/Liverpool (Britain), Ivanovo (Russia), and Halle/Leipzig (Germany). Each site stands as an example of a specific form of shrinking: In Detroit, the issue is the consequences of suburbanization; in Manchester/Liverpool, of deindustralization; in Ivanavo, of postsocialism; and in the greater Halle/Leipzig region, several of these factors are compounded. People from various disciplines, including urban geographers, cultural experts, architects, journalists, and artists, take part in the work.

Interventions for Eastern Germany /// The Shrinking Cities project initiates innovative approaches to solutions in two ways. First, together with the architecture magazine archplus, the project announced in January 2004 an international, open idea competition. Second, the two other project partners - the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau and the Galerie für zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig - will give direct commissions and work stipends related to the theme. In this way, a selection of potential interventions will emerge that offers exemplary perspectives for culturally dealing with shrinking cities. This will give the respective sites ideas for discussing their new situation and local actors new possibilities of action.

Publicity /// Communicating the work and the results of the project Shrinking Cities is an essential part of the project itself. The project's results will be presented in numerous public presentations, two exhibitions, the website, and diverse publications. The results of the first project phase (the international study) will be documented in a catalogue and an exhibition, which will be shown in September 2004 at the KW - Institute For Contemporary Art (formerly: Kunst-Werke) in Berlin. The results of the second phase of work will be presented in an exhibition in Fall 2005 in Leipzig. It is intended to then show the exhibition in additional international sites.

from the Shrinking Cities webpage

startup/work in progress

The blog "DE-tro-IT" is now established. It is planned as an evolving project, and the content and design of the site will hopefully transform and develop over time.

We don't claim authorship- we just curate the media. For you who don't know anything about our project or the "shrinking cities"-initiative ,please be patient, we will post a lot of information and links soon. We will use the blog as a media-campaign of our project, to evolve and discuss our ideas, hold online polls, etc. We welcome everybody to take part in this work-in-progress, information overload is the only ideology..
Project team contributors (Anders Melsom, Oslo, Norway, architect, Kathrine Nyhus, Oslo, Norway, architect,Ursula Faix, Innsbruck, Austria, architect) will have administrator rights to change settings, designs, links etc, but everybody else is invited to have their say about how the blog should evolve and contribute with material. Our technical advisors (Ethan Zuckerman, Cambridge, MA, USA, philosopher Peter Dematté, Innsbruck, Austria, software programmer) will also be invited to contribute.