Detroit Metro Area

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Now, I'm no stranger to the progress and decline of American industry and its effects on the landscapes and communities of our nation, but really Detroit is on a whole other level. That metro area is dominated by manufacturing in a way I haven't seen elsewhere. Even in the main downtown, with its tall commercial buildings and cool early 20th century architecture, the factories make their presence known, visible in the immediate surroundings from upper floors and parking decks, and encountered by walking a short distance outside the commercial area. Of course many of these industrial complexes, especially in the inner city, are abandoned and falling apart. But throughout the metro area, the living power and influence of industry is evident in countless examples. How tempting it is to suggest that if manufacturing left this place once and for all, it would have no reason to exist.

The region's geography is also simpler than most metro areas. A city on a river marks the center of a semicircle of sprawl on a rolling plain. The radius is about 25 miles. The sprawl is continuously expanding into gentle farmland on all sides, except for a slightly more rugged area of some lakes and forested hills towards the northwest. It seems almost like an abstract model of an American metropolis, or at least the most classic/basic example available.

I drove on Ford Road from Dearborn (right adjacent to Detroit's city limits) to Ann Arbor (a college town just outside the metropolis) - due west, in a straight line, right along the radius of the sprawl circule -  and it was uncomfortably familiar, at least in some respects. Strip malls containing mainly immigrant-oriented businesses gradually gave way to strip malls containing more generic American type businesses. Farther out, we got to massive, shining new malls and some business-free stretches lined with signs for housing communities, where you could look into layers of homes and yards along curving streets. Then, abruptly, the road narrowed,  all the lights disappeared, and we were in the rural Midwest. It was unusual to me that here the immigrant-oriented businesses were Middle Eastern (as opposed to Columbian or Central American or Indian or Chinese) but the similarities to my own metro area in form if not content were clear.  Also the edge was clearer and easier to reach than the edge of the NY metro area. The main striking thing was that the geography was so much simpler and the transitions so linear.

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