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.