RETHINKING THE POST INDUSTRIAL CITY: DETROIT<>LONDON.  On Wednesday, February 9^th, HAA participated in a London conference regarding Detroit, and the Post-Industrial City.  The conference, sponsored by Buro Happold, and coordinated by the World Architecture News, convened over 20 urban designers, planners, governmental leaders and architects to discuss the status of Detroit, and how lessons learned in London’s recent redevelopment could provide some insight into how Detroit may navigate toward to a more sustainable, viable future.

HAA attended as a design representative from Detroit, along with Jess Zimbabwe of the Urban Land Institute, whose current work focuses on the redevelopment of the Livernois corridor, and Marja Winters, the Deputy Director of the City of Detroit Planning and Development Department.  John Gallagher, writer for the Detroit Free Press, and author of Reimagining Detroit: Opportunities for Redefining the American City, also attended remotely, via videoconference.   

The event, entitled Rethinking the Post-Industrial City: Detroit<>London, was focused on four segments of analysis, dialogue and recommendation, including governance, ecology, development and society.  This structure provided a platform to develop a series of potential strategies and considerations that may inform future efforts to engage the post-industrial landscape, and performance of Detroit. 

While looking at Detroit through a European lens has arguably been as fashionable as it has been somewhat implausible, the discussions in London provided a unique opportunity for the candid exchange of ideas that might otherwise be dismissed if posited locally.  Here, simple gestures and heroic concepts, often based on real London precedents, were discussed on their merit, and how they may be reconceptualized for use in parts of Detroit.  From staged post-Olympic demolition strategies, to the Southwark rebirth that included the Tate Modern, and “free zones” for speculative limited risk redevelopment, each idea was examined for its intrinsic strengths and relevance.

The geographic, economic and cultural distances between places such as London and Detroit may be difficult to bridge at times, but we also know that being open to new ideas, methodologies and points of view, can be extremely powerful.

Our attendance at this event provoked the following questions:

• If Leipzig, Turin and Manchester are the current international post-industrial  “success stories” what might Detroit’s narrative be in 10, 20 or 30 years?
• When the economic and developmental realities of London and Detroit are so different, what are common denominators that ensure relevance and applicability?
• What if the next Detroit<>London event occurred here?  Who should attend, and what should be the subject matter?  What lessons might London and other world cities learn from Detroit?

What do you think?

HAA would like to thank our sponsors and hosts, Buro Happold and the World Architecture News.

HAA has received a Michigan ASLA Honor Award for the Lu’an City Pi River Waterfront Urban Design Plan.  Congratulations and thank you for the hard work: Christina Hansen, Shannon Mohr, Angela Hicks, Yukun Xu, Brandon List, Brett Davis, Burke Jenkins, Kent Anderson, Dan Kinkead, Jeff Mason, John Savitski, Lori Singleton, Sam Lovall, Yang Yi, Thang Tao, Nick Salowich, Carl Bolofer, and Russell Baltimore. This project demonstrated the unique collaboration between the Site and Architecture studios at HAA.

For more information on the project, please click into previous blog post here.

Located approximately eight hours west of Shanghai, the city of Lu’an is relatively small by Chinese standards.  With roughly 400,000 residents, it sits along the banks of the Pi River in the Anhui Province.   Recently, the Pi River waterfront was the focal point for an extensive redevelopment effort outlined by the City’s 2030 Masterplan.  This masterplan anticipates exponential growth, transforming Lu’an from a city of 400,000 residents to one with over 4 million people.  The 2030 Masterplan goal is to create an attractive urban waterfront that accommodates this growth model, addresses environmental challenges, and protects the rich cultural heritage of existing neighborhoods and sites.

Following the City’s release of the 2030 Masterplan, the City organized the Lu’an City Pi River Urban Design Plan as an international design competition.  Shortlisted as one of four competitors, HAA crafted an overall masterplan for all future development within the city of Lu’an.  Integral to the overall design partii, the river becomes the city’s spirit.  Humans and the environment engage the river’s edge, drawing strength from its history.  This same strength is pulled outwards along projected greenways and a network of highly functional landscape systems.  These greenway connections become the most important city infrastructure, stitching together all future developments along a varied, multi-functional recreational system.

In total, the complex master plan for a 12.3 square mile area (32 square kilometers) can be distilled into 4 major parts.

1. West Pi District: Organized along a “center green”, this district is the new cultural center, offering a vivid, lively, and modern urban experience.  The land uses are highly active – a dynamic mix of cultural attractions, department stores, shops, offices, hotels, restaurants, and residences.
2. Moon Island: Moon Island is the green heart of the city, where the primary planning initiatives – economic development, cultural heritage, environmental stewardship and recreation – join together to create a place in balance.  The island becomes a living laboratory, telling the river’s story and the rich natural resource history of the region.
3. Gao City: Gao City’s rich history is celebrated by protecting and restoring the central and oldest part of the district.  Preserving the district for future generations provides Lu’an City with an attractive, alternate lifestyle, reminiscent of Lu’an’s past.
4. Northern neighborhoods: The initial master planning effort did little to ‘create place’ beyond the main city center.  The Northern Neighborhoods are now a collection of smaller scaled neighborhoods, each with its own distinct character.  From small canal villages to transit oriented developments, these neighborhoods compliment the structure of the city’s heart to the south.

While HAA did not win this competition, several additional Chinese projects have resulted from this initial endeavor.  In future posts, HAA will expand upon these multi-cultural design efforts.

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.

DETROIT RIVER INTERNATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE.
Long known for industry and its environmental consequences, the Detroit area entered the 21^st Century a changed region. More than thirty years of committed pollution prevention and conservation yielded waterways and shorelines that once again support wildlife and inspire people.  To mark this change in regional philosophy, State Representative John D Dingell proposed legislation establishing The Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge (DRIWR). The creation of this uniquely urban, wildlife refuge reclaimed over 5,000 acres of contaminated soil, diminished wetlands, and disintegrated shorelines once used to fuel the great Detroit Industrial machine.  Managed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service since its 2001 inception, the refuge includes islands, coastal wetlands, marshes, shoals, and riverfront lands stretching 48 miles of combined Detroit River and western Lake Erie waterfront.

Charged with the planning and design of the DRIWR Gateway Master Plan and Welcome Center, HAA’s multi-disciplinary design team asserted its sustainability commitment by persuading all active community and client participants of the fundamental value of integrated ecological design.  As a result, the Gateway Master Plan and Welcome Center is a living demonstration of this principle which, when constructed, will act as a cultural and ecological mitigator between disparate social and environmental forces. The Gateway Master Plan operates as an ecological threshold on multiple levels.

THE PROJECT: Gateway Master Plan and Welcome Center

A Regional Void. Initially, HAA’s master-plan approach entailed defining void at the meta-urban scale.  Prior to the master-planning effort, the former 44 acre Chrysler automotive paint facility site was a regional void, divisive physically (geographically) and psychologically (socio-economically) between Detroit and its surrounding suburbs.  Through the proposed transformation of this former paint facility into a park-like setting, the DRIWR Gateway Master Plan recognized the region’s natural and industrial history while proposing an open-educational framework within a hybrid naturalized, post-industrial landscape. HAA’s design process was strategic, deliberately forging relationships between key community leaders, grass roots organizations, and state representatives.  HAA conducted design charrettes that engaged all stakeholders in consensus building sessions to establish a budget, program, and vision. Now, the comprehensive Gateway Master Plan calls for a restoration of woodlands and wetlands, open prairie, a new Welcome Center facility, nature trails, a fishing access pier, a canoe/kayak launch area, connections to existing waterways and greenways, and various other site amenities. The Gateway Master Plan bridges the regional metaphorical void, actively pursuing a process in which to cleanse on a multiplicity of scales:  re-education of human interaction with soil, water filtration through deliberate site design, and REFUGE for visitors from the urban industrial context and the Detroit metropolitan region.

Void as Threshold. Once constructed, the Gateway Master Plan will create a hybrid void.  In a physical sense, the wildlife refuge is an interstial space, inviting the return and co-existence of contradictory eco-systems.  The Welcome Center reinforces the performative void by acting as tendon, linking the 5000 acre DRIWR between the city and its suburbs. As physical threshold, the Refuge Welcome Center explores Detroit specific relationships between industry and wilderness, urban and suburban, contamination and regeneration.  All elements, regardless of scale, are designed to demonstrate sustainability.  Paved surfaces are minimized and porous, lighting is minimal, recycled local materials are used, and stormwater is managed and reused on site.  The existing Monguagon Drain is daylighted and naturally filtered before releasing into its historical route through Humbug Marsh.  A settling basin and wetland biologically cleans storm water emitted from the drain while providing visual interest to the site arrival sequence. The threshold between water and land is blurred by carving out a new 10 foot high riverbank, giving way to a new emergent marsh backed by a scrub/shrub habitat which slowly transitions as the elevation changes. Excavated material from the settling basin, wetland, and riverbank areas are shaped and then capped with clean fill and topsoil to create new areas of prairie and upland forests, similar to those that inhabited the site in pre-settlement times.

Programming the Void. At the architectural scale, the urban void is perhaps Detroit’s most recognizable symptom of post-industrial decline.  Nearly 75% of previously built urban fabric now exists as vacant lots.  Although much of the existing factory on the DRIWR site was previously demolished, the remaining foundations and structure were utilized by the proposed master plan and building design.  This decision was made not only for the ecological benefits, but to reinforce the site’s historic industrial narrative.  The resultant is a proposed hybrid catalyst, a facility that bridges past, present, ecology, industry, density, and void.  Designed to represent these contradictory conditions, HAA’s 24,000 square foot multi-level Welcome Center is planned to accommodate multiple stewardship programs; classrooms, laboratories, demonstration facilities, multipurpose areas, offices, exhibition space, and scenic lookouts all aid in ecological education. While the previous factory campus dominated the site with little regard to its ecological surroundings, the proposed building nestles into the new topography, minimizing its visual impact while emphasizing views to the marsh and river.  A site-wide pedestrian circulation system tangents toward the Welcome Center, over the earth sheltered construction, along the living green roof, and culminates at a scenic vista.  This physical procession builds on the transformation narrative, gently guiding visitors through the site’s heritage and regeneration. Similar to the Gateway Master Plan, the Welcome Center respects both the natural and post-industrial eco-systems; the building is a fluid extension of this new hybrid landscape.

Architecture as Ecology. The DRIWR Welcome Center showcases green technologies as building blocks to repair a damaged landscape.  Designed for a LEED platinum certification rating from the U.S. Green Building Council, the Welcome Center plans to be a net zero energy facility through the use of natural ventilation, site orientation, a geothermal well, natural lighting, and automatic lighting control. Additionally, on-site renewable energy sources such as micro-hydro turbines and photovoltaic arrays will produce more electricity than required by the site. The project also aims to incorporate emerging fuel cell technology with local energy provider DTE Energy. The building will meet strict water conservation requirements through the use of captured rainwater for non-potable uses, waterless urinals, and low-flow fixtures. Storm water runoff will be managed on-site through the use of porous paving and green roofs.  As a temporal threshold, the Refuge Welcome Center intentionally reveals past industrial errors through strategic landscape architecture and architectural interventions while simultaneously presenting the desired socio-ecological intentions of the same region.

CONCLUSION.
HAA’s approach to landscape urbanism entails, among other aspects, a metaphorical, physical, and temporal filling of the urban void. In Detroit, the void is contradictory and always dynamic.

Conversely, the void also has both spatial and psychological constraints.  Therefore, a post-industrial void must be filled by raised public awareness and the ensuing dialogue.   The Gateway Master Plan and Welcome Center design utilizes the public participatory process, an education focused programmatic objective, and the narrative of the transformation of post-industrial decay as catalysts to inspire change and promote a new type of sustainable urbanism.  As part of the project’s community outreach, HAA was involved in the curation of an exhibit at the Museum Of Contemporary Art Detroit entitled Considering Architecture: Sustainable Designs from Detroit.  Included in this show was an HAA designed exhibit displaying the outcomes of this masterplan and architectural design.  Just as the Gateway Welcome Center was designed as a catalyst, the exhibit was designed to engage the public on an intimate scale.  In effect, the Gateway Master Plan design process is the hybrid, a performative intervention equipped to help people navigate multi-scalar, multi-dimensional urban voids.

The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies.-J.G. Ballard

Tall Tales.  The story of the American transportation infrastructure system is one of heroic planning, but also of equally heroic rhetoric. At each stage in its evolution – be it the canals and waterways of the Gallatin Plan, the Intercontinental Railways, or the Interstate Highway system – the connection between the pragmatic realities of steel and concrete and the cultural myths which support them has been tenuous at best. Yet each is inextricably linked to the other, and in many cases essential to its success. As we embark on the next national transit planning initiatives, these myths will inevitably become wrapped around a new set of objectives; providing meaning and purpose to the practical endeavors of transit planning.

In particular, the myth of the Frontier has been widely adapted throughout American history as a means to rationalize, justify, or shore up the American psyche in tumultuous times. In a John Tirman article on Frontierism in modern politics, he writes that “The myth has been remarkably resilient. Not only did it inform American expansion globally during the presidencies of FDR and Truman, but the uncertainties posed by the Cold War, the nuclear arms race, and subsequent crises of confidence.”

If the Pacific Railway Act of 1862 presented the image of the frontier to the American psyche, the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956 gave the same means of exploration to the individual. Stories of the open road, freedom, exploration, and the romantic independence that accompanies the automobile are pervasive in art, literature, film, music, and advertising. The interstate system also transformed the physical landscape. As catalogued by architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, landscape architect James Corner, photographer Alex Maclean, and many others, auto-centric development created a host of new architectural types we now take for granted: roadside motels, drive-thru restaurants, shopping malls, and the notorious sprawl of suburban development.

Out of Gas.  While stories of the frontier continue to elicit dreams of exploring the untamed wilderness, in reality,  ‘The West’ was ‘won’ not by heroic individualism, but through bold planning strategies on a national scale. In his article for the Rockefeller Urban Summit, Robert Fishman describes “the greatest paradox of national planning is that Americans have practiced it so successfully while continually claiming it doesn’t exist.”  The very idea that planning can be effective at this scale runs counter to the strong undercurrents of self-determination and independence that created this country.  Yet, as Fishman points out, our history has been fundamentally defined by initiatives that were continental both in scope and support.

The Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 proposed major changes to national transportation policy and funding, marking a shift toward what former US Deputy Secretary of Transportation Mortimer Downey calls the “Post-Interstate Era”. While we are only beginning to see the outcome of these measures, it is important to consider how the changing face of transit will affect the rest of the built environment, anticipating and encouraging progressive design strategies. After years of growing misalignment between the myth and reality, perhaps now there is an opportunity to recast the myth of rugged individualism with one of networked collaboration.

Mythical Urbanism.  A recent Brookings Institute article states that “while America is more metropolitan than ever, the Nation’s policies and structures rarely match economic reality.” In terms of economic contribution, the country can be described as the sum of its one hundred or so major metropolitan areas, often overlapping state boundaries. However, funding and policies are still being handled on a state by state basis due to bureaucratic inertia and entrenched political interests. The country continues to operate under the auspices of the same mythology that created the first layers of American transportation infrastructure.

Not only do we need a new plan for national transit, new funding mechanisms and financial distribution methods, but we also need a new cultural myth. Like Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the possibilities for reimagining the built environment are vast. Just as Calvino continues to describe the same city in uniquely creative ways, our new planning strategies should also envision our cities not as alternatives to some bucolic idealization of wilderness, but as something completely different.

All Images Courtesy of Photographer, Alex Maclean.

(Please open the article to see the flash file or player.)

Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night? – Jack Kerouac

Detroit is ironically the most and least likely place to discuss mass transit. Once the home of one of the nation’s most extensive streetcar systems (link to map), Detroit has become synonymous with decentralization, suburban expansion, and the dominance of the automobile.  Where human mobility was once limited by the location of rail lines, canals, and the limited travel range of other non-motorized forms of transportation, the car provided a universal form of personal transportation which could be used at virtually any geographic scale. Unfortunately, the success of the car came at the expense of all other modes of transportation, eventually leading Detroit and other cities toward an inefficient and unsustainable transit monoculture.

Recently, infrastructural failures in this country have gained national and international attention. With increasing national imperative, as well as efforts at the regional and local level, it appears mass transit is finally becoming a reality. High-speed rail development in Florida between Tampa, Orlando and Miami, and in California linking Sacramento, San Francisco and L.A., has been covered extensively throughout the media. Portland Oregon’s streetcar system has become a benchmark for urban transit in this country. And the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) has allocated substantial funds to the development of public transit systems, indicating a shift in support and investment toward sustainable car alternatives. As this transition occurs, however, it is important to consider not only the new forms of transportation infrastructure and technology that will be necessary, but also the relationship between these and existing development patterns.

In his book, The Transit Metropolis (1998), Robert Cervero writes that in order for an urban mass transit system to work, both the transit systems and urban development strategies must be adaptive, synchronized, and complementary. In cities with predominantly low density development, like Detroit, proposed multi-modal public transit must address the realities of a dispersed population while also defining a vision for future transit oriented development. Rather than attempting to adapt new transportation technology to inefficient urban models, there needs to be a  more pliable relationship between the two, allowing both to evolve under the influence of one another. To this end, it is important for the technologies employed to be flexible in how they interface with the urban environment, and should do so at multiple scales.

In Detroit, streetcar service ended in 1953. Since that time, a number of plans for city and metropolitan transit systems have been proposed. In 1969, The Detroit Regional Transportation and Land Use Study (link to map) recommended a system of rapid transit for eight major corridors, but this plan was never realized. In 1976 President Gerald Ford offered $600 million for regional transit development, but the plan lacked political support and ultimately fell through. However, the recently constructed Rosa Parks Transit Center , the forthcoming Woodward Avenue Light Rail project, and the recently aired PBS documentary “Blueprint America: Beyond the Motor City”, are all signs that the city has embraced the potential of new public transportation.

The Detroit Regional Mass Transit Service Plan, which was approved in December of 2008, provides a phased plan for the development of rapid bus, light rail, and commuter rail transit lines. While this plan will certainly improve access to mass transit options, it is important that these become part of an urban strategy which addresses both the larger context of the region as well as the local specificities of a mixed-density city. The development of a comprehensive plan for Detroit marks the opportunity to fundamentally shift not only the way people move in the city, but how the city itself will continue to evolve in the coming years. If the last evolution in American transit history was marked by the ubiquity of the automobile, the next will be marked by the variety and flexibility of a multi-modal, and multi-scalar, public network.

As part of the ongoing HAA_Research effort, we will be exploring issues surrounding public transit both locally and nationally, in a series of subsequent posts. The topic is often painted with broad strokes which neglect its inherent intricacies. It is our hope that this installment approach will allow us to focus on specific areas of discourse within the broader debate and unfold the complexities therein. We look forward to the work growing and evolving through collaborative dialogue as transit once again takes hold in the Motor City.

DISASTER RELIEF HOUSING.  The president of Haiti, Rene Preval, is living in a tent.  Or rather, he will be shortly, once they pitch it.  He is doing this in part out of necessity and partly as a show of solidarity while he makes an international appeal for 200,000 tents.  Potentially, these 200,000 tents will house as many as a million Haitian earthquake survivors.

As the Haitian relief efforts transition from rescue, food, and medical aide, to longer term reconstruction efforts like transitional and permanent housing, the world of architecture will likely revisit the design typologies of disaster relief housing.  While much of the architectural and design community is uninvolved with disaster relief housing, some architects and entrepreneurs have produced effective prototypes that serve the global community in times of need.  There are a number of considerations for the design and implementation of disaster relief housing strategies, not the least of which address sustainability, duration of use, vernacular architecture, climate, cost, and the lives of refugees impacted by the disaster.  Most importantly, many in the scientific community predict that the global climate is becoming increasingly violent and the destructive power of natural disasters will be experienced all over the globe.  It is imperative that we develop holistic methodologies for disaster relief housing, as their necessity will become more urgent.

EXISTING SHELTER DESIGN. Most importantly, relief housing design is primarily about meeting functional requirements rather than any aesthetic intention.  Several examples outlined here represent the relative breadth of disaster relief housing.

Paper Log House. Shigeru Ban is a Japanese architect that has pioneered the use of paper tubes in building construction.  His  paper log houses for Kobe, Japan, Kaynasli, Turkey, and Bhuj, India were all created for refugees of significant earthquake disasters.  Ban chose local materials for foundations, such as plastic beer crates and rubble from fallen buildings.  The walls and structure were created from paper tubes that were insulated and ventilated through a number of methods, making them perform beyond the qualities of the typical tents that may have otherwise been provided.   A majority of the simple building components were recyclable and/or biodegradable.  Due to its flexible design and use of local materials, this particular model may represent the best relief housing implemented to date.

Bamboo Construction. India’s National Mission on Bamboo Applications has promoted another prototype, employed in India following the tsunamis of 2004. Utilizing bamboo construction, this organization took advantage of the availability of this local material, as well as its strength characteristics and renewability as a resource.  This represents a material choice that is both sustainable and durable.

Shipping Containers. A sturdier, transportation-oriented housing option utilizes shipping containers that can be moved via cargo ship, rail, and truck to locations in need.  Since the cost of transportation is directly related to weight and scale, these solutions prove to be extremely expensive and prohibitive to many governments and relief agencies.  The containers are also outfitted (quite excessively), with furniture, electric power, and air conditioning.  These are world class housing solutions, but are difficult and expensive to deploy in large scales.

FEMA Trailers. In the United States, victims of Hurricane Katrina still reside in FEMA trailers (recreational vehicles).  Unfortunately, a number of their occupants have developed serious health complications from the interior environments of these trailers.  Because of a lack of air circulation, harmful chemical compounds commonly found in fabrics and building materials may reach dangerous levels.  Without proper ventilation, these compounds are then inhaled by inhabitants.  Despite these problems, FEMA trailers provide the highest quality of life in disaster relief housing.  However, the usage of such relief housing is limited to the wealthiest of countries that are most capable of handling such disasters.

Tent City. The ubiquitous tent is probably the most common relief shelter.  Undoubtedly, we will see many organized tent cities in Haiti.  While tent cities offer flexible construction at a low cost, tents pose multiple problems: they lack insulation, they are unable to control the interior climate, and the structures are typically not durable beyond a year or two.  However, the ease of construction, portability, and low weight make them indispensable to relief organizations.  It is these positive characteristics that can inform new design solutions.

Commonalities. The breadth of solutions that currently exist are effective in some ways and ineffective in others.  Learning from these commonalities, the effectual characteristics should be developed during the design and implementation of all future design strategies.  Furthermore, these designs should take into account sustainability, vernacular architecture, durability, cost, and community engagement.

CONSIDERATIONS.

Sustainability. The role of sustainability should not be diminished, even in times of disaster.  The environmental impact of transportation, construction, and disposal of relief housing must be fully considered.  The shelter itself should respond to its climate in a way that does not require additional measures of heating or cooling.  Solutions should be fully reusable or biodegradable, and local materials should be used whenever possible.  Even for temporary solutions, the creation of refugee communities should fully consider its impact on local site ecologies, while balancing the very immediate needs of refugees.

Vernacular design. Vernacular architecture is developed by local societies over hundreds (if not thousands) of years, responding to cultural considerations and the demands of the local climate.  Any prototypical design would preferably adapt to vernacular considerations.  This could result in a physical manifestation that accommodates specific cultural practices and typical family sizes. As an example, Shigeru Ban modified the size of his paper log house design to accommodate larger family sizes in different countries.  Vernaculars can also inform factors such as ventilation, insulation, and weather resistance.  Architectural solutions that respond to vernacular traditions are an effective way to address local cultural and climatic requirements.

Durability. Durability is critical to successful relief housing.  The governmental response and implementation of long term housing is often unreliable and slow to develop.  Years after Hurricane Katrina, displaced residents still demand long term affordable housing from the US government.   Thus, housing must be able to withstand years of human use and weather conditions without degradation.

Low Cost. Currently, the cost of relief housing is most directly tied to its transportation costs.  If materials are arriving from other regions, the lighter and more compact construction materials will require lower shipping costs, ultimately resulting in the ability to provide a greater number of residential units.  When shipping prefabricated units may be economically infeasible for a crisis, a tent design may be a more economic solution.

Community Engagement. Motivating a workforce, employing refugees, and encouraging engagement in the recovery effort can perhaps be the most positive result in the construction of disaster relief housing.  Using international funding to deploy and construct temporary housing could be quite effective at reenergizing a local workforce and economy.  One could imagine a program similar to that put forth by the UN for the clearing of Haitian infrastructure. These so called work-for-cash programs would promote the creation of local jobs by engaging the disaster refugees as participants of the reconstruction effort: increasing morale, community ownership, and cooperation with relief agencies.  It is this type of strategy for which Architecture for Humanity’s Cameron Sinclair advocates.   A simply constructed residential unit could support such a program.

THE FUTURE. The future design of disaster relief housing should be responsive to many of the concerns outlined here.   If climate predictions are accurate, the future displacement of populations to natural disaster will only increase, as will the global demand for relief housing.  It is necessary to urgently develop housing solutions that efficiently respond to these crises.  Proposed relief housing designs must be rapidly deployable, cheap, responsive to climate and vernacular traditions, and sustainable.  Hopefully, with further engagement from the design community, a number of prototypes can be developed that will improve the lives of refugees around the world.

HOUSE NO. 1 : I step out of my car and glance at the address listed on my clip board.  I then compare that number to the faded house number adjacent to the front door.  It’s a match.  My partner and I glance at the neighborhood and quickly assess our surroundings.  We traverse the short front walk, step up the slightly deteriorating stoop, and ring the doorbell. It doesn’t work.  I tap my clipboard hard against the locked storm door.  I stand square with the front door, my Detroit Housing Commission badge daggling from my shirt pocket. Like standing before a metal detector at the airport, I allow a stranger to scrutinize my intensions.  I give ample time for them to complete their security check through the peephole.  As I stand there, my mind wanders.  What will I find on the other side of the door?

REHABILITATING DETROIT.  In 2009, the federal government passed the  American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.  It was enacted as an economic stimulus package and immediately pumped $12.7 billion towards the modernization of the nation’s public housing.   New leadership at the Detroit Housing Commission (DHC) has earmarked $8 million toward breathing new life into a scattered sites housing program that has proven national success.   Through this capital outlay, the DHC is continuing its mission to provide quality housing for all Detroiters.  Hamilton Anderson Associates is one of four teams of architects asked to take this journey of rehabilitation with the DHC.  Our specific task is to assess the physical condition of 80 homes, but as our work continues, we realize our assessments are also about restoring the human condition.

HOUSE NO. 14 : The door opens and I walk in.  Countless clipboards have already ‘surveyed’ their living conditions only to leave and never to be seen again.  A woman in a hospital bed lies on her back, head propped up by a pillow so that she can listen and watch the small television on the opposite side of the room.  The gurney is squeezed in amongst living room furniture.  Her eyes follow me as I survey the room.

THE DETROIT HOUSING COMMISSION. Seventy-five years ago, the Detroit Housing Commission was created “to provide safe, decent, and affordable housing for the citizens of the City of Detroit.”  With First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt helping to break ground, the DHC constructed two housing sites—Sojourner Truth for whites and Brewster-Douglass for African-Americans.  The later became the nation’s first federally funded public housing development for African-Americans.  These early developments were meant to “reward the worthiest among the temporarily poor…those who passed muster as good citizens and good investments.”

In an attempt to alleviate issues of extreme poverty, crime and segregation at many of its urban developments, many public housing authorities (including DHC) developed the scattered-site housing concept.  In 2009, this translates to DHC’s ownership of over 370 single-family homes scattered throughout the City.  Plagued by the same property management problems as its large development counterparts, roughly a third of these homes are vacant.  And those that are occupied have suffered multiple years of neglect and disinvestment.

HOUSE NO. 22 : It’s 10am.  A slender woman answers the door.  She apologizes for the beer in hand and turns off a loud playing stereo.  The noise level barely lowers; the television is also on.  As we talk, she blurts out how I’m a good looking man.  I quickly realize the loneliness that screams just as loud as the television’s distracting din.  Midway through the survey, she stops to ask me if it’s normal for houses to make noise.  “Have you ever heard footsteps in a hallway when no one is there?”

DETROIT’S HOUSING CRISIS. Detroit’s housing stock is growing increasingly old.  Based on 2000 Census data, 51.5% was built between 1940 and 1959; 29.9% was built before 1939.  Despite these statistics, housing demands continue to grow.  HUD estimates about 23,000 households in Detroit are on the waiting list for federal housing assistance.  In 2001, HUD reported 51,000 low-income renters in the city of Detroit (with incomes less than 50 percent of the area median) paid more than half their income for rent, or lived in severely substandard housing.  The Coalition on Temporary Shelter (COTS) estimates Detroit’s homeless population at 9,500.  Of those that find shelter among Detroit’s 1,995 emergency shelter beds, 23% are children.

HOUSE NO. 57 : We return to a house to find the police and a DHC representative speaking to two adults.  The squatters are being told they have 24 hours to remove their belongings.  Once inside, we find the home fully furnished.  We find breakfast still sitting on the stove.  We notice two children bedrooms.  The children will be returning from school to find that they have no longer have a home.

ARCHITECT’S HAVE A RESPONSIBILITY. We’ve all seen pictures, like those at Sweet Juniper! or The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit.  Recent Time Magazine images depict a city of static, abandoned objects, devoid of life.  These images fail to capture the human condition as found in the photography of Gordon Parks and Dorothea Lange or local photographers Romain Blanquart and Brian Widdis. As we step inside these homes, we realize that the outside world is holding a funeral for a patient that has not died.

We’ve spent the last five months immersed in Detroit’s neighborhoods and can confirm that it is very much alive. In the most distressed communities, we’ve found those that try to find dignity in their living conditions and those who have completely relinquished control of their living environments. In either case, these people demand our attention.

Architects are licensed to protect the health, safety, and welfare of the people, but what’s missing from today’s signature architecture is an infusion of social responsibility.  Architect’s must recognize that’s it’s not enough to build for oneself, but one must build for a community.  Hamilton Anderson Associates is helping the DHC not just renovate its house stock, but create places for families to live.

HOUSE NO. 62 : As I move back downstairs, I hear a young girl reading to her mother.  The young girl sounds her way through words, occasionally leaning on her mother when the words are unfamiliar.  I’m reminded of my own seven year old daughter reading to my wife. The two are laughing.  As I begin to leave, the mother stops me to ask how, despite losing her job, can she be placed in a homeownership program.  Having paid rent for more than 20 years, she’d like to own her home. I tell her DHC will get back to her and wonder if there is anything I can do to make her wish come true.

DETROIT’S FUTURE. As of today, we have surveyed over 80 houses and spoken to hundreds of people.  In future entries, we will convey stories that have happy endings.  Detroit is more than ruins, it’s a city filled with people trying to find dignity amidst a sometimes unsympathetic world.  By giving a person quality housing, we are not only investing in the stabilization of neighborhoods, but also in the ability to lift themselves out of poverty.  Instead of focusing on pictures of abandoned buildings, we will give voice to people who are part of our community.  By placing their stories within this context and physically improving their quality of life, we improve the quality of life for everyone.

On Friday, November 13, Landscape Architect Walter Hood will be lecturing at the  University of Detroit Mercy’s School of Architecture.

As stated on UDMSOA’s website,  Walter Hood is a Professor and former Chair of Landscape Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and principal of Hood Design in Oakland, CA. Hood has worked in a variety of settings including architecture, landscape architecture, art, community and urban design, planning and research. He was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome in Landscape Architecture, 1997. He has exhibited and lectured on his professional projects and theoretical works nationally and abroad.

Location:
University of Detroit Mercy | School of Architecture
Genevieve Fisk Lorenger Architecture Center
4001 West McNichols Rd
Detroit, MI 48221

Friday, November 13, 2009
NOMA reception @ 5:00 pm
Lecture @ 6:00 pm

For more information, click here

(image provided by Hood Design)

Urban Seat. Located on the banks of the Grand River, the newly constructed Riverwalk draws inspiration from geographic and historic context.  The Riverwalk cantilevers off a historic seawall and flume, adjusting in design with each kink of the structure below. To resolve each of these hinge points, the park design further unfolds, enveloping a variety of intimate spaces unique to each point.

Dynamic movements, transitional spaces, and deliberate pauses celebrate the Riverwalk experience.  Integrated urban seating ties all of these moments together, responding to specific urban riverfront context and further reconciling the geometry of the historic seawall.

The seating element originates as an 18 inch wide concrete band stemming from the water’s edge. As the Riverwalk changes directions or turns in response to the historic seawall, the concrete band gracefully rises from the pedestrian surface and pivots to become a bench, only to re-fold back down to the ground and return to the river’s edge.

In plan, these meandering concrete bands frame fields of exposed aggregate concrete.  This concrete is composed of natural Michigan aggregate readily found in the Lansing area – and remnant of glacial deposits

The result is an urban seating element that is integral to the Riverwalk design and uniquely linked to its riverfront environment.

Click here for previous Lansing Riverwalk post.