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Once Americas capitalist dream town, Detroit is our countrys greatest urban failure, having fallen the longest and the farthest. But the citys worst crisis yet and thats saying something has managed to do the unthinkable turn the end of days into a laboratory for the future. Urban planners, land speculators, neopastoral agriculturalists, and utopian environmentalistsall have been drawn to Detroits baroquely decaying, nothing-left-to-lose frontier.With an eye for both the darkly absurd and the radically new, Detroit-area native Mark Binelli has chronicled this convergence. Throughout the citys museum of neglectits swaths of abandoned buildings, its miles of urban prairiehe tracks both the blight and the signs of its repurposing, from the school for pregnant teenagers to a beleaguered UAW local from metal scrappers and gun-toting vigilantes to artists reclaiming abandoned auto factories from the organic farming on empty lots to GMs risky wager on the Volt electric car from firefighters forced by budget cuts to sleep in tents to the mayors realignment plan the most ambitious on record to move residents of half-empty neighborhoods into a viable, new urban center.