HYBRID URBANISM.
Landscape Urbanism advocates a purposeful discourse between ecological systems, human activities, and the post-industrial landscape, ultimately manifesting in the deliberate celebration of the urban void.  This celebration glorifies the interstitial, so that the void is inevitably romanticized by, and is necessary to, the burgeoning Landscape Urbanism profession. Reliance on the void introduces a basic set of dilemmas:  In order to focus on the space between buildings, there must be buildings; planning creative programming between infrastructural systems requires existing infrastructure; implementing a proposed hybrid ecology between urban eco-systems and human eco-systems requires human eco-systems.  All of these very specific examples result in a single common statement:  In order to have an urban void, there first needs to be an urban, or rather a recognizable urban density.

What if the relationship between building density and void are reversed and the void is now the primary urban component?  What does it mean to reclaim a contaminated post-industrial site within a post urban city, a city whose built fabric has devolved into vast stretches of rural landscape?  Operating within the current design process parameters, Landscape Urbanism succeeds primarily in high-density urban fabrics such as New York City, Boston, and Chicago.  In these cities, individual brownfield sites are easily identifiable as precious, rare interstitial spaces. These voids are ultimately reclaimed, remediated, and creatively stitched back into the dense urban fabric to be utilized by their host city.  In post-industrial cities such as Detroit however, the urban condition (building density) has dissolved as the metropolis has decentralized. Neither the city nor the suburbs sustain the density required to find the contaminated land valuable, and thus lack a desire to stitch these abandoned outposts into their community.  Combine all of these individual outposts together and the metropolitan region is scarred by larger swaths of contaminated land, further compartmentalizing dissipated downtowns from their thriving suburban counterparts. On the national scale, we can recognize a larger post-industrial megalopolis landscape: shrinking cities left to die back into a growing contaminated terrain.  For the City of Detroit, the void is now the majority on a multiplicity of scales. This presents the fundamental challenge of practicing a type of Landscape Urbanism appropriate to Detroit’s post urban condition.

With the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge Gateway, Hamilton Anderson Associates (HAA), seeks to broaden the Landscape Urbanism discourse by implementing a strategic, multi-scalar design process that reexamines urban and redefines the void. (more…)

CIRCUMSTANCE. Since the 1950’s Detroit’s population has been on the decline. As the city expanded outward and fulfilled mid-century aspirations for suburban life and unencumbered industrial development, the overall population began dropping from its 1,850,000 peak. Exacerbated by the combination of seemingly benevolent post-war policies such as the 1944 Serviceman’s Readjustment Act (GI Bill) which guaranteed low interest mortgages to returning veterans, Title One of the 1949 Federal Housing Act and the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, those who were not fully incentivized to leave the city were in some cases dispossessed or ghettoized.

Vital communities broke down, functional public transportation fell into disrepair and ignorant, racially motivated segregation beseeched the city, making day to day life in Detroit quite inhospitable, promoting a sharp increase in migration to the suburbs. At the same time, larger structural economic problems, such as an abiding faith in a Fordist economic model and a dominant one-dimensional industry, took their toll. By the late 1960’s the population had fallen to 1,500,000 (while the 7-county region had grown to nearly 4,500,000) and in the late summer of 1967, the infamous riots engulfed parts of the city. With this, many who had not yet left the city did so – if they had the means and opportunity.

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Over the final three decades of the 20th century Detroit maintained a steady population and employment decline as disinvestment, poor quality of life and limited services made a significant impact. Now, with the economic recession that has come to define the early years of the 21st century, Detroit’s population loss and disinvestment have accelerated (along with several other communities in southeast Michigan, highlighting the regional dimension to these pernicious problems).

Today the City of Detroit’s population is estimated around 800,000. This is less than half of its peak population 60 years earlier. According to the American Institute of Architect’s 2008 Sustainable Design Assessment Team Report, nearly 40 of Detroit’s 139 square miles of land area remain vacant along with 30,000 to 50,000 buildings throughout the city. Most recently, the Detroit Public Schools announced closure of 23 schools as the city grapples with mounting budget problems.

CALL TO ACTION. As we stand at this existential precipice in Detroit’s history we all must contribute to strategies that will stabilize and improve life in the city. From policy initiatives, to reinvestment and development strategies, we need more voices and more action to help not only the city, but the entire region. At HAA, we believe this includes architects, planners, urban designers, landscape architects and the broad, vibrant (and incredibly resilient) creative community that is alive and well in Detroit. This group, perhaps more so than any other, will be equipped to translate the myriad ideas, emotions, speeches and pro-forma into viable physical strategies that are imbued with innovative, critical and creative thought.

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