DETROIT: WHERE TO FROM HERE?

摘要

In 2002 rapper Eminem catapulted 8 Mile Road into the sensibility of mainstream America, offering up a glimpse of life in the urban ghettos of Detroit. Located on the rust belt of northern America, the Michigan State Trunkline highway system cuts eight miles of gritty urban plain east-west, forming the northern boundary of Detroit. Historically, 8 Mile Road has acted as a clear divider between the wealthier, predominantly white northern suburbs and the poorer, mostly black downtown in a city where the suburbs, downtown and state have been in constant conflict. Now bordered by dangerous neighbourhoods, 8 Mile Road is a symbolic outcome of the motor vehicle mono-economy that has left a legacy of spatial and socio-economic segregation characterizing the spectacular fall of the once affluent Detroit. Between 1945 and 1957 twenty-five new plants opened in the outlying greenfield suburbs of Detroit. These decentralized motor factories acted as magnets for clusters of dispersed suburban labour pools that fed them during the boom time of auto making in the early twentieth century. For a job in an auto plant, for a better way of life and to purchase a first, home, 1.6 million blue-collar and no-collar Detroiters migrated from the American rural south to the northern unionized industrial heartland, the manufacturing equivalent of Silicon Valley.