Belle Isle, Detroit, Michigan
A month before the state of Michigan announced earlier this year that it was sending an emergency manager to rescue financially troubled Detroit, real estate developer Rodney Lockwood Jr. published Belle Isle: Detroit's Game Changer. Part novel, part development proposal, the book takes place 30 years in the future, imagining real-life Belle Isle Park -- an uninhabited, city-owned, 983-acre island in the Detroit River -- as a prosperous, self-governing city-state of 35,000 people. In Lockwood's narrative, a group of investors plunks down $1 billion to buy the island, which attracts global entrepreneurs who develop the plot as a free market U.S. commonwealth, complete with its own laws and currency (called the "rand," presumably in homage to Ayn). It's not entirely ridiculous: New York University economist Paul Romer has long championed the idea of foreign-run "charter cities" like Hong Kong, though his project to found a new-economy bastion in Honduras recently ran aground. Consider Lockwood's dream something like Michigan's own Singapore (just with lousy weather).
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