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DETROIT CITY IS THE PLACE TO BE
By: 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 Americaβs capitalist dream town, Detroit is our countryβs greatest urban failure, having fallen the longest and the farthest. But the cityβs worst crisis yet (and thatβs 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 environmentalistsβall have been drawn to Detroitβs 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 cityβs βmuseum of neglectββits swaths of abandoned buildings, its miles of urban prairieβhe 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 GMβs risky wager on the Volt electric car; from firefighters forced by budget cuts to sleep in tents to the mayorβs 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 functioningβwhat could be the boldest reimagining of a post-industrial city in our new century.
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