[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by MPLS_Const_Watch

I know I'm jumping into this pretty late...

In my opinion, Detroit and Minneapolis don't compete for influence in many arenas. If you are arguing which is the 2nd city of the midwest, there are okay supporting arguments for both. But I think the biggest thing is the neither comes close to projecting a 2nd city level of influence across the entire region. Because Chicago is so far above either, and is located directly between the two, there's very little area where they actually compete. Minneapolis projects near zero influence east of Chicago, Detroit projects near zero influence west of Chicago. The only geographic area where both Minneapolis and Detroit project real influence and compete is in the western UP. I would argue that due to the geographic divide caused by Lake Michigan and Chicago's huge center of economic, cultural, and political mass, Minneapolis and Detroit function separately as 2nd cities in different parts of the Midwest and that neither can rightfully lay a claim to be 2nd city for the entire Midwest.

Separately, I would also argue that Minneapolis can lay a more solid claim to being the first city of a much larger region than Detroit can-- the dominant influence that Minneapolis projects across its borders outside of Minnesota across the Dakotas, much of Montana, Wisconsin, and Iowa (and arguably to a lesser extent, parts of the UP and Nebraska) is something entirely different from Detroit's influence outside of Michigan and the relationship that Detroit has with nearby states like Indiana and Ohio.

I would counter that Detroit is far more well known than Minneapolis outside of the Midwest. If you ask anyone who isn't from the Midwest to name two cities in the Midwest, they would probably say Chicago first, and Detroit second.