City of Detroit

The city of Detroit is our capital and largest city, with a population of over 6,500. The city occupies about five square miles along the coast where Lake St. Claire empties into the lower St. Claire river.

Key Civic Buildings

General: All civic buildings are powered by solar energy, with sufficient power cells to keep them operating continuously for several days of heavy cloud cover. All have audio-visual communications links with each other, and all also have long-range radios allowing them to reach Toledo or Flint (and all other receivers within 100km).

The Capitol: formerly city hall, it houses most of the administration of the city of Detroit, the state of Michigan, and the joint committees set up with the state of Ohio. Both the Detroit City Council and the Michigan General Assembly meet here as well.

The capitol also houses our Election Certifiers -- simple computers which count ballots and declare winners -- for the mayor (who is also governor of Michigan) and the city council. The Election Certifiers issue Stage V IDs to the mayor and city council. They are the only working Stage V IDs in Renewed Detroit.

Wayne State University: the larger of our two surviving universities. Wayne State has around 20 full-time researchers, and approximately that number of part-time or volunteer researchers. There are currently 235 students registered, though many are part-time or casual students.

We've managed to keep the Knowledge Bases at Wayne State University working, and tablet computers brought onto the university campus automatically connect to them. The Knowledge Bases formerly at Henry Ford Community College have been consolidated into the ones at Wayne State, as has the freshman course collection assembled from the University of Toledo. In addition, what Great Knowledge has been Recovered from the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor has also been added. Unfortunately, without the Cybernetic Installation that used to act as librarian, the Knowledge Bases are difficult to use.

Privately, some of the researchers and teachers at Wayne State admit that it would be better to consolidate Wayne State University with the University of Toledo - Health Sciences, as that has a very helpful Cybernetic Installation and better facilities in general. However, many people in Michigan worry that doing so would give Ohio too much power in the union. So instead, the two states are rivals, and both universities compete to recover Great Knowledge.

Additionally, Wayne State University has demonstration/learning AutoFarm. At the time of the Final War, it produced vanilla wafers and vanilla ice cream as ways of teaching students how to run automated agribusinesses. As it was made to be run and maintained by students, it was simple and robust, and Renewed Detroit has been able to keep it running. So, we produce small amounts of luxury food, including vanilla beans, natural vanilla extract, cookies, and several flavors of ice cream.

Detroit Medical Center: the second-largest hospital in Renewed Detroit, and the largest in Michigan. It's well equipped, with both oxygen and anesthesia for surgery, and a number of Industrial-technology drugs as well.

Police Headquarters: headquarters of both the Detroit Police Department and the Michigan State Police. The Michigan State Police have a partially-working computer system that issues Stage IV IDs. However, due to some flaw, it can only re-encode existing Michigan State Police Stage IV IDs, and so far, only 43 of those have been discovered. Those have been issued our highest-ranking police officers. (Including Mutant Animal officers; computers and robots in Renewed Detroit have been directed or reprogrammed to recognize them as people.)

Defense Headquarters: not only serves as the overall command center for our military, it also houses the Michigan Guard Infantry (Light). Adjacent to Defense Headquarters is the arsenal for the city militia and barracks for visiting regular army units.

Other Important Buildings

Ford-Fiat RoboFac: produces the Ceres Small Cargo Transport, our only in-production robot.

BrightWorks RoboFac: produces 40% efficient thin-film solar cells. It's a scaled-down copy of the BrightWorks RoboFac in Toledo, pieced together from parts salvaged or purchased throughout the Midwest, using databases from the Toledo RoboFac. Putting it back into operation as was a major expense for Renewed Detroit for over a decade.

AutoFarm 1031: grows hydroponic broccoli and broccolini, originally for the city's restaurants. Now, it's one of our main sources of winter vegetables. (We have other greenhouses, but none as efficient or productive.) The AutoFarm's name is something of a mystery: there are ruins of other AutoFarms within the city limits of historical Detroit, but none of the others is numbered, and we've found nothing like a thousand of them.