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Detroit City Is The Place To Be
Mark Binelli
The Afterlife of an American Metropolis
Metropolitan Books
November 2012
On Sale: November 13, 2012
336 pages
ISBN: 0805092293
EAN: 9780805092295
Kindle: B00842H5L8
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
Once America’s capitalist dream town, Detroit is our
country’s greatest urban failure, having fallen the longest
and the farthest. 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. Urban
planners, land speculators, neopastoral agriculturalists,
and utopian environmentalists—all have been drawn to
Detroit’s baroquely decaying, nothing-left-to-lose
frontier. With an eye for both the darkly absurd and
the radically new, Detroit-area native Mark Binelli has
chronicled this convergence. 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. 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. 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.
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