Die Welt ist Schön

Photographic records of space and economic dysfunction: Giovanni Tiso alerts me to the ruins of Detroit, a well-kicked around subject but still utterly astonishing in the sheer grandeur of the city and the scale of its desolation; this set of 'Scenes from the Recession' has been doing the rounds, but that doesn't make it any less remarkable, a true world-picture of the globalised crisis; a stark, murky photoblog of my current manor (via), a landscape largely created under Blairism, one of leisure complexes, executive flats, and inept infrastructure, built around and over an already shabby suburban-industrial area; finally Architecture in Berlin recommends a visit to the German Federal Photo Archives recently uploaded on Wikipedia Commons, especially those from the Weimar Republic, with their 'overriding impression of utter chaos, civil unrest and the rising tide of Fascism'. Could we honestly look at the contemporary photosets linked above and feel much more secure about our own future?