Detroit, at the crossroads of coal from Pennsylvania, iron from the Upper Peninsula, water from the Great Lakes, once the Silicon Valley of its heyday, drew the most talented engineers and entrepreneurs to make steel, build engines, and assemble cars. At its peak, Detroit made 80% of the world's cars. To accommodate them, in 1909 Woodward Avenue became the world's first paved road, in 1942 the Davison Expressway became the nation's first urban expressway, both then feats of engineering and symbols of progress.

But Detroit ate too much of its dogfood. The highways fostered daily escape to cheap land and the suburbs, and fed demand for even more cars. To make way for them, Detroit paved over its trolleyways. Now one-third of its citizens, too poor to afford a car, except for infrequent buses, have no means of transportation across a city sprawled over 139 square miles, larger than Manhattan, Boston, and San Francisco combined. A collapsed urban system too sparse to serve its citizen efficiently, without hundreds of billions in federal subsidy, it lacks taxes and means to build new infrastructure and dig itself out from its disinvested neighborhoods, 40% of its land. Time is nigh to nuke Detroit. Then after the apocalypse, architecture fellows, urban pioneers, and other creative mutants can help rebuild and homestead a new city.

For the rest of us, time remains to save our cities. The first step needs our collective awareness. So here see where Detroit went wrong.