How big is Metro Detroit? It depends which of four maps you use
Metro Detroit can hold 3.8 million people or 5.3 million, depending on whether you count three counties, six or nine, and more than five and a half million if you add Windsor across the Canadian border. Ann Arbor, the university city about 43 miles away, has long resisted being lumped in at all.
The core urban area, spread across Macomb, Oakland and Wayne counties, recorded 3,776,890 residents in 2020, the 12th largest in the country. Federal statisticians define a six-county Detroit-Warren-Dearborn area of about 4.3 million, and a nine-county combined area, taking in Flint, Monroe and Ann Arbor, reached 5,318,744 in 2010. Roughly 46 million people live within 300 miles of downtown, including Chicago, Toronto and Cleveland, which places Detroit at the centre of an emerging Great Lakes megalopolis.
Boundaries carry feelings. In 2012 the businessman Conan Smith told The Ann Arbor News that Washtenaw County simply lacks affinity with Wayne, Oakland and Macomb, and that joining the Detroit region felt forced and even frightening to many residents. Ann Arbor grew up separately around its university and guards its own character.
The economic identity is cars. General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, the Big Three, make the region the world's traditional automotive centre, and in the 2010s the domestic auto industry directly or indirectly supported about one job in ten in the United States. After bankruptcy, a federal bailout and restructuring, GM returned to the stock market in 2010, when automakers posted profits that analysts read as a rebound. The region also hosts about four thousand factories, robotics-driven manufacturing and firms working on fuel cells and biotechnology. The border crossing to Windsor alone supported an estimated 150,000 jobs and 13 billion dollars in annual production, according to a 2004 study.
Leisure has its own surprises. Detroit is the largest American city with casino resort hotels, and with Windsor's Caesars across the river it ranks among the country's biggest gambling markets. Around 15.9 million visitors arrive each year, and a 2006 winter festival drew about 1.2 million people downtown in the cold. The Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge, stretching 48 miles along the river and western Lake Erie, is North America's only international wildlife preserve in the heart of a major metropolis.
Source: Metro Detroit
