Detroit City Is the Place to Be by Mark Binelli

The shuttered train depot used to be called the gateway to the Midwest it now lends the backdrop to a moody 50 Cent music video.īut as the Motor City expels its weary citizens, it exerts a gravitational pull on those seeking a mournful, picturesque all-purpose emblem of American precarity.Īs a result, the dispatch from Detroit has recently become a kind of journalistic cottage industry. The hulking, empty 18-storey Michigan Central Station remains the most haunting symbol of a metropolis left behind. The massive Packard auto plant has been closed since 1958, its decrepit jungle offering a sense of adventure to 'urban explorers'. Approximately 30 per cent of the city is now vacant land, including nearly 100,000 abandoned structures, some of which have taken on the aura of majestic ruins. Though it is at the top of Forbes magazine's Most Dangerous Cities list, today's Detroit feels less menacing than empty. The city government is bankrupt, and public services are a joke. For those who remain, unemployment is rampant, and difficult to quantify.

The city's population neared two million in 1950, and now it's fallen below 700,000.

Detroit's long downturn is accompanied by an unremittingly bleak set of facts and figures.

Given the collapse of American manufacturing, and the country's ongoing dependence on outsourced labour, the crumbling institutions of Detroit might suggest a frightening prognostication: This is your town, tomorrow. The curious arrive in droves, cameras out, ready to exploit the sensationalistic imagery of first-world urban failure. Come see Detroit, they said, diverse and vibrant city of tomorrow, a model urban environment with a capacity for endless growth. It could show off the factories that pioneered assembly-line mass production, the automobile companies that promoted unmatched innovation, and the music studio that redefined the American songbook. The birthplace of the Ford Model T - and the union-fortified American middle class - used to offer onlookers and jobseekers an opportunity to bask in the capitalist dream of attainable prosperity. People come to Detroit, Michigan, to see the future. Detroit City Is the Place To Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis

Detroit City Is the Place to Be by Mark Binelli