The art of abandonment.docVIP

The art of abandonment变弃宅为艺术Dec 17th 2009 | DETROITFrom The Economist print editionSome weird and wonderful things are rising from the ashes of the Motor City在汽车城的废墟中，某些奇异美妙的事物正在出现IT IS January 2007 in Detroit; 8am, so morning is just starting to moan across the sky. Detroit is on the far western edge of the eastern time zone; winter days are short. You are preparing to head downtown from an Oakland county suburb—West Bloomfield, maybe, Southfield or Farmington Hills. To get into Detroit from any of them you’ll take the Lodge freeway. You have to: Detroit has no commuter trains, no subway, metro or underground. In the Motor City, you drive. So you trundle along on the Lodge, the morning growing lighter but not sunnier, the sky becoming the same nondescript grey as the tarmac, when, at the Lodge’s southward turn, where it meets the Davison freeway coming from the east, something unusual catches the corner of your eye.2007年1月的底特律。早晨8点，晓色初现。底特律位于东部时区的最西端；这里冬日短暂。你正准备从奥克兰县郊区出发———— 也许是西布卢姆菲尔德（West Bloomfield），也许是南菲尔德（Southfield）或法明顿山（Farmington Hills）——去市中心。要从这些地方赶到底特律，你要取道洛奇高速公路（Lodge freeway）。 你必须这么做，因为底特律既没有火车，也没有地铁。在汽车城，你得开车才行。于是，你缓缓沿洛奇公路行驶，此时晨光渐亮，但阳光却没有变得更充足，天空呈现出一种难以描述的灰色，就像是停机坪的颜色。洛奇公路南部的拐弯处与从东而来的戴维森高速公路（Davison freeway）相交，就在这里，你的眼角瞥见了一些不同寻常的东西，令你为之驻目。 Along a service road abutting the motorway on high ground, you see four abandoned houses. This hardly qualifies as unusual: Detroit’s population has cratered from around 2m in 1950 to below half that today; the city abounds in empty homes and vacant lots. Those houses are different. They are orange. Blaze orange, duck-hunter’s orange, fluorescent orange, traffic-cone orange—a shade no sane person would ever paint a house. (The proper name of the colour they have been painted is in fact “Tiggerific Orange”, from a Disney paint line; it was chosen over another shade called “Bouncy Bouncy”.) You have passed this dilapidated quartet twice a day, five days a week, for years, but you only really noticed them for