Well, there is something beautiful about ruins. I mean, in one sense it's not that different from going to Rome and looking at the Forum. But it's changing. It truly is. I'm optimistic but skeptical.

So, I mean, there's still vast swaths of the city that are suffering from a lack of jobs and poor housing and poor public schools, but they are building momentum - you know, techies, foodies, artists, musicians, all coming to Detroit. So there is this vibrancy. You see it in the newspapers every day - some story about the new Detroit.

Well, there were several things. One was that the industry itself built in Detroit was abandoning the city - taking factories elsewhere, the corporate headquarters elsewhere.

You also had in Detroit that summer, an early variation of Ferguson. A black prostitute was shot in the back by police. And all of the efforts that a very progressive police chief and mayor of that period had put into trying to restore race relations started to fall apart again, and you could see that unraveling for several years until the riots or rebellion of 1967.

And then the industry itself was so cocky about what they were doing that they weren't seeing what was coming on the horizon with Japan and Germany and other places that were building smaller cars.

Well, there is something beautiful about ruins. I mean, in one sense it's not that different from going to Rome and looking at the Forum. But it's changing. It truly is. I'm optimistic but skeptical.

I want my books to last, to stand the test of time, and to do that I focus on the forces that shape the subject - the cultural and sociological geography - to capture them in a way that will explain them no matter what they are doing.