While Macomb County is home to the white middle class that America's auto industry made possible, Oakland County is home to the affluent, business-oriented suburbanites of Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills, some of the richest townships in America.
A good number of them, like Richard Stadelberger and Robert Parks, devoted their free time to the township's rich array of youth sports leagues.
A township leader conspires to get rich by forcing peasants to plant mulberry trees, for which he sells the seeds.
Shijiaying, which is a small township in western Beijing, is rich in coal resources.
Take that scene and superimpose it on post-apartheid South Africa -- a country where the divide between rich and poor blurs in the minutes between massive townships and wealthy Cape Town suburbs -- and it makes sense that Woodstock, a gritty, formerly lower-middle class neighbourhood of crumbling Victorian cottages, is emerging as the city's new creative district.
But on a campus where township students worry about whether their families have enough to eat while rich students ride around in new sports cars, many also sat in clusters divided not only by race, but by wealth.
He took me to the rich and predominately white parts of Cape Town, followed by a visit to the townships upon whose shoulders the wealthy white community stands, but whose poverty is sometimes beyond belief.
Bloodshed once confined to black townships and routinely ignored by muzzled newspapers and television has spread to rich white suburbs.
Yet a few kilometres away from some of the township's poorest parts lie Diepkloof Extension and Pimville, home to Soweto's richest.
From the wine estates of Constantia to the colorful homes of Bo Kaap and the shacks of the suburban townships to the hipster enclave of Woodstock, Cape Town is a cultural cocktail with a rich history to say the least.
