"Detroit City is the Place To Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis" has evolved into "The Last Days of Detroit: Motor Cars, Motown and the Collapse of an Industrial Giant" for European readers, and author Mark Binelli receives a positive review in the Guardian newspaper of London.
"Binelli is a 42-year-old Italian-American with left-liberal leanings, and is firm but fair in documenting this elite's shortcomings and extreme administrative challenges. Yet he is more interested in portraiture than polemic, and the book's second half settles down into a series of delicately-drawn studies of life among the ruins. Defiant, isolated homeowners sit on their porches, surrounded by grassy emptiness, as if Detroit is turning into the rural South many of its original inhabitants came from. A bare-bones fire service is doggedly maintained in Highland Park, "the Detroit of Detroit", a separate, even frailer settlement surrounded by the city. Firemen work from tents and a trailer, set up inside a warehouse in an overgrown industrial park, "the former site of Chrysler's world headquarters".
"Of course, in cities one person's entropy is often another's opportunity. In recent years, Detroit's great, grey semi-vacuum has begun to suck in artists, activists, foodies, urban farmers, film-makers, even a few corporations, all of them attracted by its cheap space and gritty aura. Binelli, aware of the possibilities of revival they bring, and his own hipster tendencies, tries hard not to sneer. But an encounter with a longstanding black resident reveals underlying tensions. Detroit's famous ruins, she tells him, have left "scars" on locals: they are a daily reminder of the city's failures. Meanwhile some of the gentrifiers act, she says, "like they're out on the frontier and they can do anything … [But] Detroit isn't some kind of abstract art project." Binelli's achievement is to make that vividly apparent."
