When is a city not a city - when it's Detroit, downtown Detroit that is. Cruising into the city on a slow Greyhound close to nightfall, I view silhouetted a handful of skyscrapers that I assume constitute a thriving/bustling metropolis. How wrong can a traveling Scotsman be? This is a city with no heart left in it, public transport run aground without funding. Drug trading where inner city life should be teeming, all to a backdrop of street after street of boarded up shops and fenced off waste ground. This is America's Sarajevo. The best thing to happen here for sometime is three hughmungus and identical MGM casino hotels were built all in a row. Gross. I jump down from my Greyhound plateau to street level hoping that my friend Loren has made it to the terminal without delay to escort us out of this decay. His first words? "Let's get the hell outta here, no one comes downtown". Loren grew up in Detroit, left in his twenties to live in Scotland and has returned to take up residence in suburbs far north of his childhood neighbourhood. To get there we have to schlep from 1st Mile Road to 14 Mile Road - yeh, that's fourteen miles from ghost town to Newtown. We cross 8 Mile Rd, the frontier or more commonly "baseline"…. Eminem territory (from the film). Even Eminem has moved on to new pastures, leaving his homies to fend for themselves. A little about the neighbourhood up at 14 Mile Rd; Jewish, Arab, Christian Arabs, some Indians and Americans coexist in condos or larger houses in square mile housing schemes bordered by six and sometimes eight lane roads. Shops come in strips of three hundred meters, one storey high. Bakery joined to gym along side Starbucks all co-habiting as "strip malls" with parking lot. You drive everywhere, why walk when you have a SUV (4x4 for the folks back home or perhaps Sudden Use of Vehicle, as defined by young Alexander). Loren promises me he took a stroll down to the wholefood superstore last Xmas. This is a new America and there most certainly is a strong sense of community in this strange new flatland. Pioneers in a 21st Century way. I was always warmly welcomed with open arms at all venues and homes.