The decline of Detroit and the end of modern industrialization
also has its modern Pompeii and it's called Detroit. Not only empty factories, warehouses collapsed failure of industrialization, as well as theaters, schools, libraries into disrepair. A vast emptiness of modern aspirations portrayed with an eye by Andrew Moore, a celebrated architectural photographer and lecturer at Princeton, author of a report published by the decline Damiani (Detroit Disassembled, 40 €). More than Pompeii, in fact, Detroit brings to mind the late ancient Rome, when the immense spaces of the churches were used as a shelter to flocks, on the steps of the theaters are encrusted barracks, the statues were in huge mortars pounded to make lime for construction. Similarly happening today in the historic capital industry where, under the huge roofs of the factories crackling hearths of the homeless, laboratories and offices are ransacked in search of some good fortune, packs of dogs and other animals is reclaiming spaces deserted by men . If someone does not understand what the post-industrial world, one might say, send it to Detroit. For shows how quickly nature reduces to nothing the largest rational project.
How quickly the centrifugal perhaps of companies and interests, bringing energy and wealth elsewhere, have evaporated a model of society that seemed impossible to deconstruct. The title chosen by Moore is perfect: Disassembled Detroit, in fact, the utopian industrial modular dismantled piece by piece. The autopsy of this process is available for a long time in the writings of Alain Touraine, Ralf Dahrendorf, Daniel Cohen, Prem Shankar Jha, for example. And the dynamics of the decline is unclear as it is irresistible: creating global infrastructure that industrialization creates the conditions of the relocation. The entrance to bully machine that reduces human labor to an absolute minimum (the workers are now less than 10 percent of workers). A drastic reduction of production costs leading to the emergence corporate and moves resources in making and marketing. 'Information Society', someone would have called the current system where produce material objects does not cost anything, where the work has little value, but where are counting the advertising and marketing, along with the finance that allows you to draw money anywhere on the planet. A pair of shoes designed in New York, made in Calcutta and made attractive to Los Angeles, for example. The first victim was the modernity and its industrial model. What was Durkheim called 'organic solidarity' between managers and workers, joined by a feeling of participating in the same company. Second victim "society."
consists of classes in conflict perhaps, but coordinated in achieving the same project. As a partnership we can be, in fact, between a worker and a contractor on two opposite sides of the world? And what union can there be, when workers are increasingly crucial to the production cycle and there is the impending threat of relocation? Here it is contemporary, as well, where social ties and political fray, the cohesion is loosened and the nation-states, invented by modern production units, fall apart. Where even the artists have become managers who design and outsource production the works. In Detroit, a city model of modernity, therefore, not only perish industries and row houses for workers, but also libraries, theaters, public services. All elements of that material and cultural progress of the community who, having no more reason to exist, they are abandoned to themselves. If everyone goes its own way, if there is a collective project, in fact, why invest the emancipation of all? As evidenced by photos of Moore, train stations seem to ancient ruins, the classrooms of universities and theaters they fall to pieces become parking lots, a symbol of the transition from social to the individual.
happens to Detroit, but also hundreds of industry capital. In Mulhouse in France, Guinea Bissau, or Hashima in Japan by Mitsubishi's industry-island population density hallucinating (to 85 thousand km2), where nothing was missing from work to leisure, and that some would turn into a museum of modern UNESCO deceased. As suggested in the book writer Philip Levine, wherever there are resources policy has responded to the decline in innovation and investing in training, trying to ride the division of labor established by the global world, where you could see the developed countries allocate more complex functions, administrative or creative, but intellectual. Cities such as Hamburg, Manchester or our Turin, have invested many years in the conversion and services. Instead of the industries were born universities, research centers and offices. Not even where they lack the means or foresight: in the industrial areas of southern Italy, in the huge industrial cathedrals of the former Soviet Union, in the same Detroit. Whose uniform, however, now predicts the rebirth in the shadow of Obama's green economy: Speramus Meliora, Resurget Cineribus. 
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