Lost Signals Report[]
The Residential Depopulation Atlas (mis-titled The Residential Population Atlas), published in 1966 by MIT Press, was one of many such reverse-Great Society works projects, different from each other in kind only. Although the term “planned shrinkage” was used ten years later by Roger Starr in connection with New York City’s mid-1970s (also planned) financial crisis, residential depopulation, much like the “deep state,” was a concept that left no record, that had no author. Unattributable until the publication of the MIT atlas the term had, by that time, been de-fanged and rendered as something barely worthy of academic study. Lost Signals acquired, via broadcast, four minutes of video, documenting the atlas until the recording is ended, violently, in a flood of red light. This clip is from the two-minute mark. —S. Martinez