Digital photography

I agree, they're fascinating pictures. I remember seeing a photographic series of such houses a few years ago. There would once have been full terraces into which these individual houses used to be integrated.

Strictly speaking, the city, within the city limits, is depopulated; however, the same cannot be said of the wider metropolitan area, which is still very large and to which many of the former residents of the urban core have migrated.

In the age of mass motorisation, American cities were de-cored by policies of 'decentralisation'. Prevalent ideas of the time included worries about quality of life in traditional cities (which at the time consisted of old houses without mod cons which often didn't get much light and unsanitary conditions, similar worries as in London, of course). The hope was that higher mobility would enable great flexibility of where people lived and where they worked, so that they could live on more land per person and in larger houses, driving their cars to wherever they needed to go. The hope was that economic activity could take place anywhere, as geographic centralisation was no longer seen as important as before for defining potential markets. Thus, you might have seven out-of-town shopping centres within half an hour's drive of a million people, and people would vote with their wheels where they wanted to go. City authorities would no longer have to invest heavily in public transportation to congested city cores (it is always important to stress that congestion is actually a symptom of success of cities), and orbital travel would take precedence over radial travel.

To a limited extent, such policies could be beneficial; it is perfectly conceivable for a city to be over-centralised and for a little bit of loosening of the distribution of activity to be a good idea. However, in many places the policies went too far and ended up taking away the economic vitality of the core. The actual result was that the unique function of the urban centre in being able to combine many specialist activities that made not only the city but also the surrounding area vibrant and attractive was undermined by fewer people coming together there. In some places, like Detroit City, there was obviously also problems like racial segregation and industrial decline; deeply ironically in the case of Detroit, as it obviously used to be the world's largest manufacturer of the very same motor vehicles that drove decentralisation.

The upshot are houses like these ones; probably the result of a very few people choosing to stay on while the terraces around them were demolished, although they themselves appear to have been long gone.

The Government's disastrous 'Pathfinder' programmes enable quite a few StreetView/photographic opportunities in areas awaiting demolition in this country, too, usually still fully integrated into undemolished terraces.

Yeah, I like the pretty colours.