Detroit has a central core with broad avenues that radiate out. The concentric boundary streets are marked in a way that only a city planner could love. The road eight miles out from the center is called ‘8 Mile Road.’ Five miles later it’s ‘13 Mile Road.’ It goes on like that to the edge of town.
There is a difference between municipal boundaries and cultural geographies, though, especially in Detroit. Teenagers blend the borders of the city with their bikes every day. Muscle cars stream Latin polka through Black neighborhoods and down crumbling freeways. Poverty creates a density in one place and a vacuum in another. The region really is a collection of places mapped out by the cultures that inhabit and transgress its linear design.
Read the full essay at Arts in a Changing America.
Anne L'Ecuyer 