Motor City

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    Detroit, on a nice night.
    "This city has no viable future."
    —Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools

    Detroit, Michigan is the center of America's automotive industry. Ford, General Motors and Chrysler have headquarters there. Its most recognizable structure is the GM Marriott Renaissance Hotel. In The Eighties there were parts of town where they would shoot at anyone passing by in a Japanese car. Today the shooting is much less discriminate (for several years, it alternated back and forth with Philadelphia for the distinction of the US city with the highest murder rate).

    It is geographically notable for a few reasons. Despite being separated from Windsor, Ontario by the Detroit River and Lake St. Clair, it features the busiest US-Canada border crossing—the Ambassador Bridge. It is also the only place in the contiguous 48 States where Canada is south of the US, since Windsor juts out to the west just so. Detroit itself is surrounded by smaller independent municipalities, who form the Detroit Metro area, and whose people get kind of cheesed off when everyone just lumps them in. With both a Spanish-language Univision station in Detroit and a CBC tower in Windsor rebroadcasting the main French-language feed from Montreal, it's one of the only areas in the United States where you can watch free-to-air TV in three languages, the other being Providence, Rhode Island (English, Spanish, and Portuguese).

    The metro Detroit area is home to a myriad of cultures and ethnicities, including one of the largest Arab populations in North America, centered in Dearborn (with a sizable Lebanese outpost in West Bloomfield—where they get along rather interestingly with the large Jewish population). It is also very economically-segregated but even more racially-segregated, with poorer minorities living in the city, the white working-class in the eastern suburbs, and the predominantly white and Asian-American upper-middle-class in the western suburbs and Grosse Pointe. The Detroit metro area ranks second in the nation in racial segregation, after Gary, Indiana.

    Depending on who you ask, the city may be on the cusp of a rebirth, or completing the slide from Dying Town into Ghost City. The trend (unfortunately) seemed to move toward the latter, thanks mostly to the almost surreal corruption of Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, and the federal bailout of General Motors and Chrysler which resulted in smaller companies, with the requisite job and wage cutbacks. The new[when?] mayor, David Bing, is infinitely more competent (although that's hardly saying much), Michigan's Governor Rick Snyder has shown at least a vague interest in getting the city going again (although the methods he proposes are very, very controversial), and the Big Three have returned to profitability and (more importantly) actually make good cars again, so things might get better. Maybe. Perhaps.

    AKA "Hockeytown" for the Detroit Red Wings, a perennial Stanley Cup contender and the team that Gordie "Mister Hockey" Howe played for.

    Works set in Detroit or its nearby communities include:

    Film

    Live-Action TV

    Video Games

    • Deus Ex: Human Revolution (Partly set in a futuristic Detroit not much different from the present one)
    • Millennium City, the setting for Champions Online, was built on the ruins of Detroit after Doctor Destroyer obliterated the city in 1992.
    Famous People from Detroit or nearby include:


    Musical acts

    Celebrities

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