Forget all this talk about “right-sizing” the city of Detroit back to health, some urban experts are now saying that the exact opposite must be done.

The Atlantic’s Mark Binelli (who apparently has a non-fiction book about Detroit in the works) writes about the latest big idea, that of super-sizing, to fix the city of Detroit.

The takeaway from the census stories was that Detroit plummeted to 19th place on the U.S. city-size list, behind Austin, Jacksonville and Columbus (Columbus!). But the Detroit metropolitan area — which we’ll define, for these purposes, as Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties — still retains a population of nearly four million.

Binelli writes that many “urbanophiles” have latched onto the idea after citing cities like Philidelphia and L.A. that were able to grow by “grabbing up” the surrounding suburbs.

In takeaway, the idea of super-sizing would essentially mash the city and suburbs together to form one unified metropolitan area.  This concept of the “elastic” city, as proposed by former Albuquerque mayor David Rusk, has already taken hold in places like Houston and Seattle.

…the Greater Detroitopolis would easily vault past Chicago to become the third-largest city in the U.S., behind New York and Los Angeles. This would translate into more state and national clout (and allocated funds, many of which are based on population) and eliminate the need for much of the wasteful duplicate spending inherent in maintaining dozens of tiny separate municipalities, especially at a time when many of these suburban communities have announced their own cutbacks.

However, at the end of the day, the fruition of such an idea is extremely far-fetched considering one of the biggest issues that has split the city of Detroit and the suburbs for ages now: race.

…long-nurtured, largely racial city-suburb resentments would never allow for such bedfellowing. White suburban residents would freak out at the possibility of merging with a city so long demonized as a terrifying warzone; the black leadership in Detroit, meanwhile, would surely be loathe to see its own political power subsumed within a majority-white supercity.

Read the full article here.

Image courtesy of The Atlantic