Back in 2009, when the American auto industry was in free-fall, Mark Binelli joined the great migration of newspaper reporters and magazine writers — myself among them — heading to Detroit. We were all looking for a fresh angle on what was essentially the same ­story: What happens to the city that they’ve been (barely) supporting when the Big Three, like the wobbly legs of a rickety old stool, finally give way?

And Detroit wasn’t just any postindustrial city. It was the birthplace of modernity, “the Silicon Valley of the Jazz Age,” as Binelli describes it. The factories that had once churned out flashy new cars — shiny totems of the American dream — were now empty and decaying, spawning a Lonely Planet-worthy phenomenon known as “ruin porn.” (“I came to see the end of the world!” one German college student told Binelli outside the shuttered Packard plant.) So, to put the rhetorical question a bit differently, what happens to the city of the future when it no longer appears to have one?

Unlike the rest of us, who filed our dispatches and moved on, Binelli, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and Men’s Journal, decided to write a book about Detroit. He had a personal stake in the city, having grown up in one of its blue-collar suburbs, St. Clair Shores. He rented an apartment in Detroit’s Eastern Market district, where his neighbors included the founder of the local chapter of the Black Panthers and a couple who had moved, inexplicably, from Hawaii.

“Rather than relitigate the sins of the past, I hoped to discover something new about the city — specifically, what happens to a once-great place after it has been used up and discarded,” Binelli writes. “Who sticks around and tries to make things work again? And what sorts of newcomers are drawn to the place for similar reasons?”