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ST. PAUL, Minn. — The movie “8 Mile” starring rap superstar Eminem triggered great interest in me in Detroit, a city that had fascinated me for a long time as the center of the automobile industry in the United States, a country on wheels.

Detroit was one of a dozen cities my World Press Institute 2003 colleagues and I visited during our three months of traveling around the United States. Coming from Shanghai, China’s largest and fastest developing city, I had special interest in observing urban development and social change. My general impression about most U.S. cities was that their economies were in good shape, they were very leafy and clean and had wonderful layouts with an array of dream houses, but poor public transit systems.

The beautiful picture I formed was suddenly shattered when we took a tour of Detroit. I expected to find 8 Mile, the rough neighborhood featured in the movie, but I was not prepared to see thousands of abandoned houses, rotten neighborhoods, drunken people and prostitutes on street corners swirling with litter.

The ride itself was like watching a movie with scenes changing swiftly from one block of magnificent mansions surrounded by neat greenery to another block of abandoned houses suffocated by rampant wild plants. Just one narrow road could separate a wonderland from a ghost town. Many of the once golden locations for retail businesses in downtown Detroit had apparently become unpopular, as there were vacancy signs everywhere.

“What’s going on in Detroit?” Everybody had this question in mind. The city was once densely populated with people like many other thriving metropolises. But it lost half its peak population of 2 million over the past 40 years. I heard one local joking that the two easiest things to buy in Detroit were guns and drugs. You could hardly see any retail services around the neighborhoods except stores selling alcohol.

Detroit had been very dependant on the Big Three auto companies — General Motors, Ford and Chrysler — for its livelihood. After the heyday of the auto industry the decline pulled many jobs out of the city.

Tens of thousands of middle-class families and whites fled, leaving Detroit an almost all-black city suffering from disinvestment and a loss of federal funding. “Segregation” may have become an old-fashioned term but the fact of racism still lingered in many cities in the United States.

In the cities we traveled it was common for there to be a clear line between affluent white neighborhoods and poor black communities. Well-intentioned locals often would warn newcomers or visitors like me to stay away from certain neighborhoods where concentrations of poor immigrants and colored populations were seen as breeding nests for various city crimes.

‘Crime and all kinds of havoc’

Chicago, which some said was the most truly American city, attracts millions of tourists every year for its fantastic modern architecture.

“It is seen as the birthplace of skyscrapers. You will fall in love with the city after a boat tour for architecture sightseeing along the Chicago River,” Blair Kamen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune, told us. (We took the 2-hour tour and it easily won my heart with the city’s array of masterpieces built beginning in late 19th century.)

“But in the west part of downtown Chicago you would find some abandoned buildings which could harbor drug dealers. And Chicago has been the most segregated city,” Kamen said. “Public housing is a tool of segregation in which poor and black reside. Places with a concentration of poor populations are producing crime and all kinds of havoc.”

The typical government-supported public housing complex in Chicago was a shabby, 16-story white building inhabited predominantly by poor black people. Many lived there their whole lives without going to work; they didn’t necessarily have to pay rent. Gang activities, drug dealing and prostitution were rampant in these buildings. People were as fearful of getting close to those buildings as they might fear the plague. I was surprised that government welfare efforts would end up with such a sad result.

However, amid the dim scenes I also saw the light of hope.

“Gentrification” was a buzz word often encountered in many US cities. It referred to the restoration and upgrading of deteriorated urban property by middle-class or affluent people. It was a social engineering project, changing the appearance (of a neighborhood) and mixing together people from a wide range of incomes to change the landscape.

Chicago was taking the lead in the transformation of city landscapes by changing the perception of public housing.

“We plan to invest $1.5 billion to rebuild and rehab 25,000 units of public housing. In the meantime, we will also help them with day care, getting education, job training and drug treatment in order to stop the cycle of poverty,” said Terry Peterson, CEO of the Chicago Housing Authority. CHA started its ambitious plan in 1999 and in four years it started to see some success.

Another successful gentrification case I saw was in Harlem, a neighborhood of New York City located in northern Manhattan. Inhabited mainly by a black population, Harlem, despite soaring real estate values elsewhere on the island, was long forgotten and had a bitter history of segregation. Now, however, it was thriving with an influx of new investments, retail businesses, banks and young dwellers in parallel with the renovation of many old buildings. Former President Bill Clinton had moved his office into a high-rise building in Harlem.

There is a saying I’ve heard: “If you hate somebody, send him to New York. If you love somebody, send him to New York.” It shows people’s mixed feelings about living in big metropolises that embrace everything from filth to beauty.

My affection for cities will not change. I love cities and I believe development can transform them into better and more exciting places to live.