THE RUINS OF DETROIT (United States, 2005-2010)

Thanks to the auto industry, in the 1950s Detroit, with a population of two million, was the fourth largest city in the United States. And thanks to the factories moving to the outskirts of the city, to ‘white flight’ to the suburbs, social unrest in the 1960s and the crisis in the auto industry, the city’s population fell by half. Detroit became a post-apocalyptic décor of ruins. As Marchand and Meffre note, “No less than the pyramids of Egypt, the Colosseum in Rome, or the Acropolis in Athens, its monuments, still fascinating in their decay, are the remains of a great, lost empire.”