Andrew Moylan on Reviving Detroit
In the wake of officially receiving approval for bankruptcy protection, Detroit's story has become a familiar one. Once the poster child of America's industrial might and middle-class prosperity, decades of economic decline have brought the city to its knees before a bankruptcy court with as much as $20 billion in debt. The decline of an iconic American city has led to a flurry of finger-pointing, both to assign blame for the crisis and to identify the right direction forward. Reshaping a broken city with strong traditions of insularity and distrust of authority would be difficult in any event, writes Andrew Moylan, but the nature of Detroit's problems puts it in essentially uncharted territory.