A collapse in infrastructure, rising pollution levels and now a constant fear of terror—is this the beginning of the end for the metropolis?

Here I come! Been saving all my life
To get a nice home For me and my wife.
—Langston Hughes, “Little Song on Housing,” 1955

One sunday morning in 1951 Detroit, Michigan, Harry Shiovitz, a 32-year-old salesman, was celebrating the bris of his son Nathan. The dining table was stacked with traditional Jewish dishes: blintzes, kugels, cheeses, pastries, and smoked fish. Even as the family was chatting and eating amid shouts of Mazel Tov, Shiovitz and his wife knew his house, for which he had borrowed the US $500 down payment only a year earlier, would not be home to Nathan. This world, the northern frontier of Detroit’s Jewish neighborhood, was coming to an end. “We were already planning to leave,” he said.

Over the last 50 years, Detroit has lost almost a million of its former 1.85 million people. About three-quarters of that million were white. What made the world’s “arsenal of democracy”—the city had emerged from World War II as the international capital of the booming auto industry—alter its role? The Blacks were moving in and, according to the newspapers then, the Blacks meant crime. “Genug iz genug,” as the Yiddish saying goes: “enough is enough.”

Immediately after the terror attacks in Mumbai, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg put New York City’s subway system “on high alert” based on “an unsubstantiated report of potential terrorism here in New York,” Bloomberg said in a statement. Across the pond, London’s Underground was reminded of the attacks on King’s Cross and Edgware Road stations in 2005 and upped its security manifold. Islamabad is sill ringing with the gutting of the Marriott in September this year.

... contd.