Detroit ( ) ( , pronounced ) is the largest city in the U.S. state of Michigan and the seat of Wayne County. Detroit is a major port city on the Detroit River, in the Midwest region of the United States. Located north of Windsor, Ontario, Detroit is the only major U.S. city that looks south to Canada. It was founded on July 24, 1701 by the Frenchman Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac.

It is known as the world's traditional automotive center; "Detroit" is a metonym for the American automobile industry and an important source of popular music legacies celebrated by the city's two familiar nicknames, The Motor City and Motown. Other nicknames emerged in the twentieth century, including Rock City (after the Kiss song "Detroit Rock City"), Arsenal of Democracy (during World War II), The D, D-Town, Hockeytown (a phrase officially owned by the city's NHL club, the Red Wings), and The 3-1-3 (its telephone area code).

In 2008 Detroit ranked as the United States's eleventh most populous city, with 916,952 residents. At its peak in 1950 the city was the fourth largest in America, but has since seen a major shift in its population to the suburbs.

The name Detroit sometimes refers to the Metro Detroit area, a sprawling region with a population of 4,425,110 for the Metropolitan Statistical Area, making it the nation's eleventh-largest, and a population of 5,354,225 for the nine-county Combined Statistical Area as of the 2008 Census Bureau estimates. The Detroit-Windsor area, a critical commercial link straddling the Canada-U.S. border, has a total population of about 5,700,000.World Agglomerations Retrieved on May 5, 2009.

History

main: History of Detroit The city name comes from the Detroit River ( ), meaning the strait of Lake Erie, linking Lake Huron and Lake Erie; in the historical context, the strait included Lake St. Clair and the St. Clair River. Traveling up the Detroit River on the ship Le Griffon (owned by La Salle), Father Louis Hennepin noted the north bank of the river as an ideal location for a settlement. There, in 1701, the French officer Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, along with fifty-one additional French-Canadians, founded a settlement called Fort Ponchartrain du Détroit, naming it after the comte de Pontchartrain, Minister of Marine under Louis XIV. France offered free land to attract families to Detroit, which grew to 800 people in 1765, the largest city between Montreal and New Orleans. Francois Marie Picoté, sieur de Belestre (Montreal 1719–1793) was the last French military commander at Fort Detroit (1758–1760), surrendering the fort on November 29, 1760 to the British. The region's fur trade was an important economic activity. Detroit's city flag reflects this French heritage. (See Flag of Detroit, Michigan).