Detroit was once one of the most beautiful cities in the United States. Architecturally, much of that beauty still remains.

Here are a few pictures I took in Detroit last weekend of some beautiful boarded up buildings:

They're palaces, really. And like many a palace in history, they've fallen into serious decay.

For decades, there's been a lot of talk about a "Detroit Renaissance" of a sort similar to that which has gone on in other cities, but for a lot of reasons (including continued deterioration of the local economy aggravated by horrendous mismanagement) Detroit's Great Reawakening has just not happened. But at least the theoretical goal of a Detroit Renaissance was never abandoned.

Never, that is, until the recent appearance new movement which seems deliberately calculated to end all talk of urban renaissance -- in Detroit and in many other cities. I refer to the insidious (almost Ceausescuesque) proposals being seriously considered by the Obama adminstration -- to simply raze huge urban areas. Not preserve, not repair, not rebuild, but destroy. But instead of saying they're going to "destroy the city in order to save it," they're calling the idea a radical experiment:

The radical experiment is the brainchild of Dan Kildee, treasurer of Genesee County, which includes Flint.

Having outlined his strategy to Barack Obama during the election campaign, Mr Kildee has now been approached by the US government and a group of charities who want him to apply what he has learnt to the rest of the country.

Mr Kildee said he will concentrate on 50 cities, identified in a recent study by the Brookings Institution, an influential Washington think-tank, as potentially needing to shrink substantially to cope with their declining fortunes.

Most are former industrial cities in the "rust belt" of America's Mid-West and North East. They include Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Memphis.

In Detroit, shattered by the woes of the US car industry, there are already plans to split it into a collection of small urban centres separated from each other by countryside.

"The real question is not whether these cities shrink - we're all shrinking - but whether we let it happen in a destructive or sustainable way," said Mr Kildee. "Decline is a fact of life in Flint. Resisting it is like resisting gravity."

Karina Pallagst, director of the Shrinking Cities in a Global Perspective programme at the University of California, Berkeley, said there was "both a cultural and political taboo" about admitting decline in America.

"Places like Flint have hit rock bottom. They're at the point where it's better to start knocking a lot of buildings down," she said.

Flint, sixty miles north of Detroit, was the original home of General Motors. The car giant once employed 79,000 local people but that figure has shrunk to around 8,000.

The question of how to create an urban renaissance in places like Detroit has become how to prevent an urban renaissance.

Easy. Ceausescu led the way. Just tear down the past. That way, bourgeois sentimentality can never show its ugly head again.

Anyone remember the so-called "anti-sprawl" movement? In a wholesale reversal of that, the idea will now be to move people from the cities and further out into the suburbs:

The city is buying up houses in more affluent areas to offer people in neighbourhoods it wants to demolish. Nobody will be forced to move, said Mr Kildee.

But not to worry. They're calling it a back to nature movement:

"Much of the land will be given back to nature. People will enjoy living near a forest or meadow," he said.

The story about the new demolition campaign was linked by Ann Althouse, who as Glenn Reynolds observes, asks some tough questions:

You can't just return to nature by removing the streets and buildings. What will these non-urban buffer zones really look like? Even if it is something like a forest -- made of very fast-growing trees? -- or meadow, what sort what sorts of animals -- rodent and human -- will run wild there?

Personally, I'm fascinated by ruins, and I am not alone. The classic ruins of Detroit ruins are becoming attractive destination spots, and they are attracting more and more tourists, as well as creative people with ideas.

Might certain government types find this offensive? I can't help but wonder whether part of the goal of the new anti-renaissance movement might be to prevent what's been happening in Detroit -- people like artists buying cheap houses, then moving in and fixing them up:

A local couple, Mitch Cope and Gina Reichert, started the ball rolling. An artist and an architect, they recently became the proud owners of a one-bedroom house in East Detroit for just $1,900. Buying it wasn't the craziest idea. The neighborhood is almost, sort of, half-decent. Yes, the occasional crack addict still commutes in from the suburbs but a large, stable Bangladeshi community has also been moving in.

So what did $1,900 buy? The run-down bungalow had already been stripped of its appliances and wiring by the city's voracious scrappers. But for Mitch that only added to its appeal, because he now had the opportunity to renovate it with solar heating, solar electricity and low-cost, high-efficiency appliances.

Buying that first house had a snowball effect. Almost immediately, Mitch and Gina bought two adjacent lots for even less and, with the help of friends and local youngsters, dug in a garden. Then they bought the house next door for $500, reselling it to a pair of local artists for a $50 profit. When they heard about the $100 place down the street, they called their friends Jon and Sarah.

Admittedly, the $100 home needed some work, a hole patched, some windows replaced. But Mitch plans to connect their home to his mini-green grid and a neighborhood is slowly coming together.

Besides, how much in property taxes can the government get from people who paid $1900 for a house? The only kind of development government favors is the kind that generates money for the government, so from a revenue standpoint, independent ownership of inexpensive housing is a nightmare. Tearing down the neighborhoods and taking the land off the map relieves the government of having to provide city services on the one hand, while allowing the later possibility of government development schemes whenever they feel like it. (Another horror for which Kelo greased the skids....)

I better stop thinking about all the awful possibilities lest I give the radical experimenters more ideas...