Detroit City is the Place to Be
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Author(s)
Binelli, Mark
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Abstract
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.
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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Date
2013-08-28
Extent
84:43 minutes
Resource Type
Moving Image
Resource Subtype
Lecture