America Today

As an outsider, I suppose I came with a foreign perspective. I was expecting a city to be like that of those in Europe, where communities lived and worked together, perhaps distinctively but with a bustle of everyday life.

What I found in the American cities I visited was quite different. In places like Detroit, Philadelphia, Memphis, Paterson, New Jersey; buildings had declined, been abandoned like an decaying empire. I found abandonment not only physically but psychologically. The city had become a former shadow of itself, carrying on the motions of a city with transportation routes and financial districts, but the city itself was abandoned.

White flight, suburbanisation, mall-culture, economic recession and the end of homegrown industry has transformed these cities into ghost-towns. The relics of a more prosperous and homogenous past visible all around but the city of today looked more like a no-go zone after an apocalyptic event. Are we looking at ruins following the end of a civilisation that was so cherished by it's people?