Car Parks That Used To Be Amazing Places: #1 The Michigan Theater, Detroit

This blog sometimes features car parks which have been transformed for better things. Sometimes, it can be the other way round - great places get turned into car parks.

 
One such is the Michigan Theater, featured in Requiem for Detroit, Julien Temple’s amazing documentary shown on BBC2 last weekend. Detroit, home to Fordist mass production and MoTown, has become a synonym for disinvestment, destruction and devastation. Some call it a Slo-Mo Katrina. The decaying buildings are Blade Runner meets After We’ve Gone, the empty freeways are dystopias by JG Ballard, the urban farms are a post-modern mash up of subsistence agriculture poking throught the broken concrete of a ruined industrial economy. It might even be The Future. The symbolic weight of all this goes way beyond what you could invent.