But it is a distinct city. With a separate mayor, a separate budget, and so separate issues that it has to deal with due to its budget shortfalls. Including issues with the City of Detroit being one of its creditors, due to unpaid water bills.
It is not uncommon for there to be cities or towns in the metro area of other cities that are independent. For instance, Cambridge is different than Boston; or for an even closer example, Brookline which is surrounded on three sides by Boston is independent from Boston. Or Oakland is not San Francisco, nor is Almeda Oakland.
Or for other examples of being completely surrounded, the Vatican is not Rome. Monaco is not France.
The "technical boundary" is not irrelevant here. We're talking about different jurisdictions, with different governments, and an article about how one government is failing to provide some basic services is distinct from another government that is close by but has very different issues due to the differences of scale and available tax base.
> with fields in between them, as opposed to a continuous metropolitan area.
But that's not how cities work. It is very common for two cities to be part of one continuous metropolitan area, and the only way you notice the boundary is by paying very close attention to signs as you pass them.
> My question is whether there might be some political context to the way this article is written. Do you know of any?
I think that the context for this article is just that it's an interesting phenomenon; this small city, which grew very fast during the auto boom and has been fading slowly ever since, and now the government is so cash-strapped that it doesn't even have the personnel to work with independent non-profits to do things as basic as keeping the streetlights on, but also due to the small scale it's possible for individuals and neighborhood organizations to provide some of their own services that the city can't.
The issue of "the government barely exists", as expressed in the title, is not true of Detroit as a whole. While the Detroit government does have issues of being short on funds, it is large enough that there is a recognizable government that is able to do things. But for this small city, which grew very quickly and then has slowly been fading away, the size and scale make it very hard to have a functioning government that can reasonably govern.
And while the state and the federal government obviously do exist, for many of the things that ail Highland Park, the state and federal government generally work by providing grants to cities and towns, but being as cash strapped and small as this city is, it's hard for it to take advantage of programs that could bring in more revenue.