Courtesy of DetroitOGRAPHY
How well do you know your Detroit neighbors? The city of Detroit is bordered by 20 municipalities; can you correctly place all of them?
Michigan’s “Home Rule City” Act halted many smaller municipalities from being absorbed by the City of Detroit when it passed in 1909.
Besides being a city, Detroit is a broad concept in our metropolitan region. Depending on who you talk to, Detroit can mean the nine-county economic zone defined by the Detroit Regional Chamber, or simply the small, expressway-bounded area of Downtown Detroit if you are a visitor or transplant to the city.
Residents of many adjacent cities affiliate with Detroit in order to be recognizable, but don’t always want to be affiliated with the issues associated with the city. Detroit city
government leaders live all across the region and overall 70% of workers in Detroit
commute in to their jobs.
Today we have a mixed region of large and small municipalities, some successful – some struggling, others very diverse and some not so diverse, but we are all neighbors. How we face the future depends on our collective understandings and shared connections.
Follow this link to try the map puzzle yourself:
https://ol-samples.pages.dev/
This is part of a series from the unofficial cartographer of Detroit, Alex B. Hill, a self-described “data nerd and anthropologist” who combines mapping, data, and analytics with storytelling and human experience. He is the founder of DETROITography and author of “Detroit in 50 Maps."
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