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Category Archives: Detroit

Books on Cities: David Maraniss, Once in a Great City (2015)

Tuesday, October 10, 2023

The twenty-tens brought forth a spate of books about Detroit, each of which takes a different angle on that troubled city: the straightforward history of Scott Martelle’s Detroit: A Biography, the bleak reportorial machismo of Charlie LeDuff’s Detroit: An American Autopsy, returned Detroiter Marc Binelli’s Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of […]

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This week’s city reading: the future of Detroit, a farewell to London, and the failings of transit in the San Francisco Bay Area

Sunday, September 17, 2017

Detroit Open City (Aaron Robertson, Los Angeles Review of Books) “The species of loneliness one feels in New York is not the same in Detroit. There is an overwhelming awareness that in a city this large, things should be louder. ‘Detroit is the biggest small town in America,’ I once heard someone say. The slogan rings […]

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This week’s city reading: Detroit stays flawed, Mexico City kills parking minimums, corporations flee the suburbs

Saturday, August 5, 2017

The new Detroit’s fatal flaw (Heather Ann Thompson, Washington Post) “Way back in July of 1967, just before that infamous evening when Detroit went up in flames, city boosters had been feeling pretty optimistic about the Motor City’s future. Detroit, then the nation’s fifth-largest city, was a metropolis that epitomized all that postwar America had to offer. Home to […]

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The History of Cities in 50 Buildings: The Renaissance Center

Friday, May 22, 2015

No one has taken as much blame for Detroit’s woes as the major American car companies who, through the early 20th century, concentrated themselves there to such an extent that the city’s name became a byword for the industry. Despite the contradiction of an urban metropolis owing so much to an explosion in car ownership, […]

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