Detroit and the Ruhr: Two Post-industrial Landscapes

Using the examples of Detroit and Germany’s Ruhr Region, the photo essay addresses the challenges former industrial centers across the United States and Europe are confronted with at the end of production: shrinking populations, the loss of jobs and the decay of industrial sites. One popular narrative about de-industrialization in both Detroit and the Ruhr is the idea of a “rebirth through culture” following the discovery by the so-called creative class. While the media discourse is more or less similar, dealing with processes of structural change always still needs to be locally specific–there is as of yet no standard recipe for reviving these cities, and changing their image in the face of increasingly “global” demands remains difficult.