Brief City
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Detroit is the largest city in the U.S. state of Michigan and the seat of Wayne County. The city, founded in 1701 by French fur traders, is a major port city located north of Windsor, Ontario, on the Detroit River, in the Midwest region of the United States. It is known as the world's traditional automotive center and an important source of popular-music legacies, celebrated by the city's two familiar nicknames, Motor City and Motown. The city's name comes from the Detroit River (in French Rivière du Détroit), meaning "River of the Strait," linking Lake St. Clair and Lake Erie.
The name Detroit sometimes refers to the Metro Detroit area, a sprawling region with a population of 4,488,335 for the Metropolitan Statistical Area and a population of 5,428,000 for the nine county Combined Statistical Area as of the 2005 Census Bureau estimates. If the adjacent Canadian city of Windsor and its suburbs were counted, the area has a total population of about 6 million (see: Windsor-Detroit). Detroit's urbanized area population, which measures the physical build of a metropolis, sat at 3,903,377 as of 2000, making it the 9th largest urbanized area in the U.S. In 2005, Detroit ranked as the United States' 11th most populous city, with 886,675 residents. This marks a sharp deciline of a roughly one million residents since 1950 when the city had a population of 1.85 million. Largely the result of the white flight to the suburbs, the city is left with many decaying structures and considerable socio-economic problems such as high crime and poverty rates. |
