Detroit City Is the Place to Be

• Detroit City is the Place to Be by Mark Binelli on Powells

• Mark Binelli's website


Is "afterlife" death? Is it a variety of living modified by the adjective after—meaning in the wake of something else? You've probably heard of urban prairies and renatured yards.

Like all great cities, Le Détroit du Lac Érie began and then flourished along a river—the Detroit River is both a river and a strait between Lakes St Clair and Erie.

This book chronicles the place that became the Motor City from its founding in 1701, follows with its growth in population, economic importance, and global impact. Binelli describes Detroit's decline and outlines some of the reasons. And no, Detroit doesn't resemble any postcolonial African state.

I've previously blogged about how Detroit draws me. Family of origin on the side I know something about hailed from Detroit. As a seventh grader I took my first solo flight (as a passenger) to Detroit. Attended my first MLB game at Tiger Stadium, RIP 2009. Those facts relate to my lifelong passion for cities in general, my lifelong resolve to beautify the inner city, and my adult sense of call to serve the urban church.

Binelli's bona fides include growing up in a Detroit suburb and becoming acquainted with the city proper when he worked for his family business as a teen. His reasonably objective perspective as a mainstream journalist is another asset. He moved there to get firsthand experience of Detroit's afterlife; the resulting field reports clarify both the human cost of the past and illuminate hope for the future

Detroit City is the Place to Be is copyright 2012. It's now 2023. The prose and characters engaged me, but without an updated sequel the book left me hanging. Not in terms of wanting more of what I'd already read, but because I need to know about now. I've read about the city exiting bankruptcy. I know a little about neighborhood farms and river restoration projects. I rejoice that wildlife again is at home along the river, but I can't feel what's going on. I often tell people I'd relocate to Detroit if it weren't for the weather. Is living there the best way to discover what's transpired during the past decade? "Imported from Detroit" became an American auto industry buzz-phrase. How about if I expatriate myself to Detroit?

On page 95 the author quotes Corine Vermeulen: "the birthplace of modernity and the graveyard of modernity." I fully trust "…hope literally growing from the fallow soil of the post-industrial necropolis." [page 56] Renatured yards and urban prairies because… nature has a way of stripping away the past and opening doors to newness.

• My Amazon Review: Urban Prairies, Renatured Yards, Revitalized City

Downtown Detroit skyline from Windsor, Ontario
by Ken Lund on Flickr