Detroit City Is the Place to Be by Mark Binelli

It may not be the only American city to have taken an economic beating, but no other city has fallen farther than the city of Detroit. Now, Detroit is the stereotypical representative of everything that could possibly go wrong in an American city. Once it was America’s boomtown, a beacon of opportunity that, for decades, attracted countless job seekers from less prosperous regions of the country. Beyond the usual portrait of crime, poverty, and ruin, we glimpse a longshot future Detroit that is smaller, less segregated, greener, economically diverse, and better functioning-what could be the boldest reimagining of a post-industrial city in our new century.ĭetroit City Is the Place to Be is one of Publishers Weekly's Top 10 Best Books of 2012 Read more Sharp and impassioned, Detroit City Is the Place to Be is alive with the sense of possibility that comes when a city hits rock bottom. Throughout the city's 'museum of neglect'-its swaths of abandoned buildings, its miles of urban prairie-he tracks both the blight and the signs of its repurposing, from the school for pregnant teenagers to a beleaguered UAW local from metal scrappers and gun-toting vigilantes to artists reclaiming abandoned auto factories from the organic farming on empty lots to GM's risky wager on the Volt electric car from firefighters forced by budget cuts to sleep in tents to the mayor's realignment plan (the most ambitious on record) to move residents of half-empty neighborhoods into a viable, new urban center. With an eye for both the darkly absurd and the radically new, Detroit-area native Mark Binelli has chronicled this convergence. Urban planners, land speculators, neopastoral agriculturalists, and utopian environmentalists-all have been drawn to Detroit's baroquely decaying, nothing-left-to-lose frontier. But the city's worst crisis yet (and that's saying something) has managed to do the unthinkable: turn the end of days into a laboratory for the future. Once America's capitalist dream town, Detroit is our country's greatest urban failure, having fallen the longest and the farthest.

Detroit City Is the Place to Be by Mark Binelli