What happens when Capitalism fails to work:
The ruins of Detroit
eg, "In December 2001, the old Highland Park police department in Detroit was temporarily disbanded. The building it vacated was abandoned with everything in it: furniture, uniforms, typewriters, crime files and even the countless mug-shots of criminals who had passed through there.........."
and there's more.
eg, By the 1950s, Detroit was home to almost 2 million people, and its mainly single-storey suburbs had spread over 120 square miles.
Detroit's dramatic decline began soon afterwards, though, and those same suburbs would play their part in the long saga of abandonment and decay.
The collapse of the automobile industry started in the 1950s and reached crisis point in the 1960s and 1970s, due mainly to the demand for cheaper imported cars, made mainly in Japan, and the attendant rise in global oil prices.
The so called "white flight" from the city centre began in the 1950s and soonan increasingly black city was surrounded by a ring of communities that were all white.
This "white noose", as one contemporary observer referred to it, helped strangle the inner city, both economically and socially, turning it into a series of large ghettos intercut by freeway. Unrest reached a head in 1967, when 43 people were killed in a week of rioting that started after police officers raided an after-hours drinking club and which left the downtown streets looking like a war zone.
Since then, the city has been left increasingly to its own devices abandoned by politicians, planners, developers and businesses, by all, in fact, but the black urban poor.
"Even grocery stores and supermarkets disappeared from the city," writes Sugrue. "By the first decade of the 21st century, observers described Detroit as 'a food desert' a place without even a single, well-stocked supermarket within its boundaries."
A gallery of 16 amazing pictures of the 'ruins of Detroit'