From: esti@quads.uchicago.edu (Paul A. Estin)
Subject: Cities and Metro Areas
Reply-To: esti@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: U. Michigan Cognitive Psychology
Date: Fri, 21 Aug 1992 15:22:19 GMT

Snark pops his head in the door and notices a slight dearth of
patrons, and an even greater dearth of conversation.  Must be August.

"Wow, it's been slow around here!

"I've been thinking of starting a posting thread, but just haven't had
the energy to bother... I've been feeling kinda tired since I've gone
back to work (even at a mere four hours per day) post-mono-break; what
energy I have has been going into more personal email, and,
fortunately, also real-people-conversations.  ('I'm doing fine,
thanks; just bought a new Mac so I can log in from home.')

"Another reason for not posting is that the two things most on my mind
are either too personal to post, or else would get me into a long
argument I'm just not up for at the moment ('A Cynic's Guide to the
U.S.  Presidential Election').  So, instead, I'm merely going to
reedit some email I previously exchanged from DM, in hopes of getting
the ball rolling..."

General Topic: Cities and Metro Areas
Specific Topic: Detroit and Ann Arbor

>I looked up Ann Arbor in my atlas. It's virtually a suburb of Detroit! 
>Well, maybe not, but the distance between those two places is not much 
>further than the distance I commute each day.

Ann Arbor has a weird relationship to Detroit; *I'd* tend to call it a
suburb, but it does exist as sort of an independent entity, a
university town.  (One sign of its independent status is that, being
devoid of a car, I haven't visited Detroit proper in the past year!
Of course, that probably has a lot to do with me having been attached
to Chicago, as mentioned before.)

The way I look at the metro area around here is like this: Once there
was a City called Detroit.  They built cars there.  Then, as in many
cities, suburbs grew up around the City.  But later, the City started
falling apart; there were economic problems, and because there was no
good public transportation (the local government being controlled by
the auto industry), as the City collapsed, not many suburbanites had
both reason and access to go into town.  So the City collapsed still
further.  Anyone who could afford to escape to the suburbs, did...
and the City collapsed further.

Meanwhile, the people in the suburbs built their own city adjacent to
the original Detroit City (now becoming a bombed-out fire trap)...
skyscrapers arose, and sports teams, musical performances, and special
events moved out to what we might call the de facto suburban city of
Detroit Metro, a ring-shaped entity adjacent to Detroit City.  It even
has its own major airport (a mere half hour drive from Ann Arbor,
conveniently).  Detroit Metro became, mostly by default, what Los
Angeles is by design-- a suburban wasteland city-- with the some of
the same sorts of problems.  For example, a car is a requirement
because of insufficient (and, by the nature of the city layout,
inefficient) public transportation.

Ann Arbor itself is a bit too far out for the ring city of Detroit
Metro to quite encompass it, and in any case, it's a bit large and
unique, so it stands a bit separately from Detroit Metro, but is
adjacent to it, in much the same way, on the other side, as Detroit
City is adjacent to Detroit Metro.

Got that?  Anyone else have anything to say about the structure of the
cities and metro areas in which they live?

-----
"All the world is a stage.  This summer I fell through the trap door." -me

Paul Andrew Estin, net.Snark, r.a.c Welcome Poster, HoloMuck Chancellor,
  Fellow of the Clementine Society, UCSFC First Consul/ Keeper of the Slinky
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