America and China: The Eagle and the Dragon Part two: Requiem for a dream - Telegraph

Once symbolic of optimism and certainty, America's credit-crunched suburbs may be facing a decline as dramatic as that of Detroit, itself once a beacon of industry. Mick Brown and the photographer Alec Soth continue their investigation into the contrasting fortunes of the US and China.

The birthplace of modern America - one might say the modern world - is a huge disused factory building that stands on a busy six-lane boulevard in a part of Detroit named Highland Park.

As the birthplace of mass production, Detroit 'set the pattern of abundance for 20th-century living' More pictures by Alec Soth with commentary by Mick Brown

Outside, on a scrubby patch of untended grass, is a sign posted by the Michigan Register of Historic Sites stating that this was the factory where, in 1913, Henry Ford began the mass production of automobiles on a moving assembly line. By 1915 Ford had built a million of his Model Ts; by 1925 more than 9,000 were being assembled in a single day.

Mass production, the sign reads, soon moved from here to all places of American industry 'and set the pattern of abundance for 20th-century living'.

It is a wonderfully evocative phrase that stops you in your tracks - the pattern of abundance for 20th-century living. From here came the principles of mass production that provided the goods that fuelled the consumer society; from here, the automobile that begat the roads and the freeways that carried people and goods from sea - as America the Beautiful has it - to shining sea, and then to the world beyond.

America and China: The Eagle and the Dragon Part two: Requiem for a dream - Telegraph

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