num_pages: 318
description: The fall and maybe rise of Detroit America's most epic urban failure from local native and Rolling Stone reporter Mark BinelliOnce 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 neo-pastoral agriculturalists and utopian environmentalistsall 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 and Rolling Stone writer Mark Binelli has chronicled this convergence. Throughout the city's museum of neglectits swaths of abandoned buildings its miles of urban prairiehe tracks the signs of blight repurposed from the school for pregnant teenagers to the killer ex-con turned street patroller from the organic farming on empty lots to GM's wager on the Volt electric car and 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 future Detroit that is smaller less segregated greener economically diverse and better functioningwhat might just be the first post-industrial city of our new century.
language: English
title: Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis
publisher: Metropolitan Books