Go here for a very interesting essay [[Part 1) by Dean Herron:
http://places.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=13778

"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.” Her wonderment is precisely rendered, if not precisely news"