Depopulation is a fact of life in Detroit. The once bustling city is now undertaking a massive project to demolish massive sections of the abondoned homes in the city. In this story from GQ, the author rides along side the demolition teams. (Warning, there is some strong language used.)

Though we're technically in the middle of the morning rush, there's hardly anyone on the road. Lorenzo, 49 and a twenty-six-year demolition vet, maneuvers his Kenworth, and the 80,000-pound excavator he's towing behind it, with ease. The temperature in the cab is calibrated to freezing. There's a plastic bag of water bottles and Amp Energy drinks sitting behind the gearshift on the floor and a smaller bag filled with oranges on a ledge behind Lorenzo's seat. "We don't stop long enough to eat anything else," he says, widening his sleepy eyes. "Sometimes I bring bananas."

Lorenzo heads up Gratiot, one of Detroit's main roads, one of six arteries that emerge from Downtown like the spokes of a wheel. It's a stretch of the city that once teemed with retail and restaurants. Life. Now, with its faded signage and trashed storefronts, it's wasted in a way that will prompt this story's photographer, Tim Hetherington, who lived in West Africa for almost a decade, and who was tragically killed Misurata, Libya on April 20th, to call me when he lands at the airport—just off the Gratiot drag—and ask whether he's somehow touched down in Kinshasa or Monrovia.

There is an upside to all of this though. In a curious sort of way, Detroit has become a lab for radical democratic experimentation and citizen engagement.

"Detroit is the most democratic city in America," writes Mitch Cope, one of the catalysts of the aforementioned artists' block, on the blog at powerhouseproject.com. "Not in the political sense or government, but because the neighborhoods are ruled and run and controlled and developed by local citizens. It’s a city where you can do things, both bad and good as you choose without much oversight, enforcement of law, or rules imposed from above. It is up to the residents to decide what it is they want to do, how they govern their particular block or street, and therefore what they want their city to be. Democracy in Detroit has ironically come out of the lack of a functional government/political democracy."