WSU English professor pens a thoughtful piece about Detroit's 'borders,' both real and imagined

If you're used to reading 400 words this might not be the piece for you. It's long and academic and we even found ourselves drifting a bit (honesty is the best policy). There are, however, some observations and points made about not only our real borders (Canada) but our imagined ones (Eight Mile) that make it worth the read.

Excerpt from "Borderland/Borderama/Detroit," posted on Design Observer Group:

Detroit Looks Just Like a City...
... Especially at night, from my apartment downtown, with its floor-to-ceiling glass: that's when Detroit really does look like a city; friends have come over to dinner, 28 floors up, sitting around my table, and inevitably someone turns toward a window and remarks, as if arriving at an original insight, which of course it is for the person making the observation, who has just now noticed the altogether astonishing fact that despite what you might expect, what people know about this place, and what the person about to be delivered of the insight also thought up until this very instant: "Detroit looks just like a city!" The conversation stops, maybe, for a few seconds, while the other guests glance toward the windows, the vast grid of lights arrayed across the night-time landscape out toward the dark, invisible horizon. And it's not the first time you've been witness to such a discovery, not if you have lived here any time at all. The other guests nod polite agreement: Yes, Detroit does look just like a city. And then they go back to eating their dessert.

But it's not a city, not when the sun comes up and you can see the place. It was a city once, that's clear, or at least Detroit seems to have been a city, given the physical evidence left behind in maybe the most moved-out-of metropolis ever settled and then evacuated by Americans — houses and factories, theaters and schools, streets and whole neighborhoods now walked away from on so spectacular a scale that you can't fault other people when they register amazement. "It is a remarkable city," Rebeca Solnit wrote in Harper's, "one in which the clock seems to be running backward as its buildings disappear and its population and economy decline."

Read Part 1 here, Part 2 here and Part 3 here.