Economic flexibility or urban blight?
Having questioned the flexibility of the British economy in my last post , I came across an article which made me wonder the same about America: ...the city took a marked turn for the worse. We passed vacant lots surrounded by listing barbed-wire fences, the shells of abandoned mini-malls and the cement outlines of what might once have been petrol stations, now being reclaimed by bushes and grass. There were lots of these ‘urban fields’, where buildings had been torn down and nothing built in their place, and it was curiously unsettling to see how easily sizable chunks of a city could be erased and swallowed up once humans left. ...the neighbourhood reached its nadir – no small feat – with boarded-up houses, a couple of burned-out shops being used as squats, a low, forbidding bar called ‘Club Rolex’ and, saddest of all, the brick skeleton of what had been George Rogers Clark Junior High School. It stood like the shell of a dissolved monastery behind a high wire fence in an asphalt...