*********************************
There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
*********************************
Johnathan Short
One Consulting Group, Inc.
Summary Sentence: No summary sentence submitted.
Full Summary: Fabulous Ruin: How Detroit Became the World Capital of Staring at Abandoned Old Buildings, and the Ling Shot Plan to Shrink a Major American City
Mark BinelliWednesday, August 28, 6 pm Georgia Tech, School of Architecture Reinsch-Pierce Family Auditorium 245 Fourth St NW, Atlanta, 30332 map + directions
Co-sponsored by the Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Architecture. Book signing co-hosted by A Capella Books immediately following the lecture. This event is free, wheelchair accessible, and open to the public.
Once America's capitalist dream town, Detroit is our country's greatest urban failure, having fallen the longest and the farthest. But the city's worst crisis yet (and that's saying something) has managed to do the unthinkable: turn the end of days into a laboratory for the future. Urban planners, land speculators, neopastoral agriculturalists, and utopian environmentalists—all have been drawn to Detroit's baroquely decaying, nothing-left-to-lose frontier.
With an eye for both the darkly absurd and the radically new, Detroit-area native Mark Binelli has chronicled this convergence. Throughout the city's "museum of neglect"—its swaths of abandoned buildings, its miles of urban prairie—he tracks both the blight and the signs of its repurposing, from the school for pregnant teenagers to a beleaguered UAW local; from metal scrappers and gun-toting vigilantes to artists reclaiming abandoned auto factories; from the organic farming on empty lots to GM's risky wager on the Volt electric car; from firefighters forced by budget cuts to sleep in tents to the mayor's realignment plan (the most ambitious on record) to move residents of half-empty neighborhoods into a viable, new urban center.
Beyond the usual portrait of crime, poverty, and ruin, we glimpse a longshot future Detroit that is smaller, less segregated, greener, economically diverse, and better functioning—what could be the boldest reimagining of a post-industrial city in our new century.
Mark Binelli is the author of Detroit City Is the Place To Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis and the novel Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die! He grew up in metro Detroit and lived in Atlanta for six years before moving to New York City. He is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and Men's Journal. Detroit City Is the Place to Be was one of Publishers Weekly's Top 10 Best Books of 2012.
MORE INFO: + New York Times Book Review: Detroit City is the Place to Be by Mark Binelli + ART PAPERS LIVE! at artpapers.org
ART PAPERS LIVE! HOST COMMITTEE & SPONSORS: Johnathan Short One Consulting Group, Inc. PennHouse Productions W Atlanta-Downtown
