I recently just moved to Detroit.
I am taking my first few months in Detroit slow, learning her soul.
Detroit is a useful contradiction because it was not a peripheral city trying to become relevant. It was relevant—technologically, industrially, and culturally—at a scale that reshaped the global imagination of production. And then it ceased to function as the kind of system it had been.
The 1950 census lists Detroit at 1,849,568 residents. [2] By the 2020 decennial census, the city’s population is 639,111. [3] A structural unwind.
The misleading part is that the city is still physically large. The Census Bureau profile reports Detroit’s land area at about 138.7 square miles. [4] Detroit is large enough to fit the combined land areas of San Francisco, Boston, and Manhattan within its borders—and it actually ranks 64th in the United States by land area.
