Southfield

Southfield got its name the plain way — it sat in the “south fields” of neighboring Bloomfield Township — and it grew up the practical way, too. Settled in the 1820s, it stayed farm country for over a century, then took its modern shape when Northland Center, one of the very first shopping malls in the entire nation, opened here in 1954. The city itself didn’t incorporate until 1958 (after voters rejected the charter three separate times), but once it did, Southfield became metro Detroit’s corporate powerhouse.

Its nickname is “the center of it all,” and it earns it: Southfield has the second-most office space in the metro after downtown Detroit, over a hundred Fortune 500 companies with offices here, and a skyline of five mirrored-gold skyscrapers — the Town Center, home to the tallest building in any Detroit suburb. But here’s what design lovers should know: Southfield is quietly one of Michigan’s great centers of mid-century modern architecture, with work by Minoru Yamasaki (who’d go on to design the World Trade Center) and the striking 1962 Shaarey Zedek synagogue. And here’s what everyone should know: Southfield is one of the rare American suburbs that became genuinely diverse and stayed economically stable — a community that chose to welcome integration when so many others fought it.

Southfield’s identity is more institutional than celebrity — and proudly so. It’s the home of Lawrence Technological University, the broadcast studios for much of Detroit television, and an architectural legacy that draws design pilgrims. But its real claim to fame is its people: a community that, starting in the 1970s, intentionally built one of the most successfully integrated and stable suburbs in America. Sometimes a city’s most notable achievement isn’t a famous name — it’s getting something right that almost everyone else got wrong.