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 also a broad concept in our metropolitan region. Depending on who you talk to Detroit can mean the 9-county economic zone defined by the Detroit Regional Chamber or simply the small expressway bounded area of Downtown 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.
DETROITography 
I really wanted to try this game. First your data collection is buggy. I couldn’t just type in a city outside the Detroit metro area. Second if I failed to capitalize everything properly it wouldn’t work, even if I selected the drop down. When I finally got around all that I couldn’t drag and drop the pieces, the entire map just got dragged around. I am a developer so I understand. I want you to fix the bugs cause then more people will use it. Its a very clever idea. I am a huge fan of your work.
Thanks Rick, there have been a few people having trouble with the click vs. click and drag option. We’ve updated the text to hopefully help people understand to click and release on a municipality to select it and then click and drag to place it on the map. We’ve had a really great response so far!
Alex: Why do you limit this map to just immediately adjoining suburbs. Huntington Woods, Royal Oak, Taylor, Beverly Hills, Birmingham, Troy … there are so MANY other ‘burbs that identify with Detroit … ever more today than in the past. There are 4.65 million Detroiters! And, alas, too many of them do NOT know their geography because of the way the 20th Century treated Detroit as a landing zone for immigrants yet a place to escape from when your particular ethnic tribe succumbs to fear of The Other.
I figured 20 was the most people would stick around for. The region is so large that I didn’t want people to be overloaded with choices. Maybe we can make a level 2 map if you score well enough on Round 1.