"Brooklyn" now carries with it a cultural cache that I have become inured to after living here for 5 years. Brooklyn, in my world, means visitors asking if my neighborhood is safe to visit at night, RSVPs that don't show up to events, friends in Manhattan complaining about how "accessible" various neighborhoods are. Brooklyn, outside of New York, means something else. Basically, it means the enclave of Williamsburg.
Rather than call one city the next [other] city, I hope it is possible to develop useful terms and analytical tools to describe and measure contemporary urbanism. If Detroit is being called the next Brooklyn or Berlin, it is possibly because we have not yet sufficiently understood what Brooklyn and Berlin are made of. We have not yet created the terms of assessment, parsed the mechanisms at work, so we must point from one thing to another, like a child calling every dog by the name of the family puppy. "Look, it's another Fido, and another!"
As far as the similarities from one urban circumstance to another, there is a case to be made for the emergence of a global typology and the slow transformation of American cities toward a global model. White flight, the demographic phenomenon that defined American cities in the 2nd half of the twentieth century, is finally unwinding itself. Witness the rise of the "hipster," which is really just a polite and racially sublimated way of talking about white culture as urban culture. Alongside this, we are witnessing the rise of the black and immigrant suburbs. American cities are moving in the direction of operating more like European and South American cities. The latter part of the twentieth century in this country was an anomaly compared to global urban and suburban development, and that historical moment is over.
via www.domusweb.it
Unpacking the idea that Detroit is "the next" [insert city name here].
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