New Book: Detroit: A Biography

How Detroit might fashion a decent future is a recurring topic in urban circles. A new book, Detroit: A Biography (Chicago Review Press, 288 pages, $24.95) by Scott Martelle, gives readers much of the background they need to understand how Detroit got into such difficulty that it lost one resident every 22 minutes from 2000 to 2010. The city’s 139 square miles now contain about 714,000 people, down from 1,850,000 in 1950.

Martelle a former staff writer for the Los Angeles Times and the Detroit News, is especially good at probing the change and decline in Detroit’s industrial base over the past several decades and at capturing the long history of clashes between blacks and whites.

Signs of improvement: Rapes and robberies have dropped by two-thirds since the late 1980s. Artists have settled in the city, “drawn by its openness, its cheap cost of living, and the sense of romance attached to being an urban pioneer,” he notes. Urban farming, a phenomenon that’s attracted a lot of attention, “might create some seasonal jobs, and they would be good use of abandoned land.” But urban agriculture, according to Martelle, is more of a “when you have lemons, make lemonade” tactic than a strategy capable of redirecting Detroit’s trajectory. “Until the sharp barbs of racism are dulled,” he warns, “Detroit will not revive.”