Detroit: City of the Future (trendsetter alert!)

The Financial Times has an interesting piece about the present state of Detroit.

Boing Boing has an interesting take on the city, imagined as an archetypal "science fiction" city:

I got to thinking that Detroit may be the most science fictional city in the world -- if sf is about the way that technology changes society (and vice-versa), then Detroit, the first New World, world-class city built around a high-tech industry that collapsed, is about as science fictional as it gets.

When I think about it, the premise makes sense: it is places like this that become quickly interesting and unpredictable as the 'old order' of social structures breaks down and there is neither an entity big enough or effective enough (government, corporation, civic society, etc.) to impose a new order, nor a large enough population base to maintain its social influence over such a large city.

Maybe big new things will be coming out of places like detroit in the future; nothing like what came out of them in the past, of course, but these things may well be even bigger and certainly stranger.

(here's your chance, trendsetters: I heard that the median price of home sales in Detroit have dropped to $7500!)