Detroit: Contested Urbanisms of Abandonment
In collaboration with
Martin Murray, PhD
Olaia Chivite Amigo
Sponsored By
Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning, Michigan Mellon Project
Exhibitions
Seoul Biennial of Architecture 2019
Date
Oct 2018 – May 2019
The successive cycles of urban transformation in industrial regions during the last century have created uneven, asymmetrical landscapes consisting of scattered abandonment interspersed amongst nodes of concentrated activity. Among many cities following this pattern, Detroit has been widely acknowledged as a primary example of failed urbanism in the post-industrial age. Disinvestment and socioeconomic restructuring have driven the city to abandonment and neglect, creating what appears under-utilized largely forgotten left-over spaces.
This project examines the case of Detroit through a finely-grained account of the disparate narratives chronicling the existing realities and projected futures, their representation and mediation. We argue that traditional land use planning approaches do not recognize improvisational activities in highly vacant areas, failing to project alternative, more just city futures. Looking at what happens to leftover spaces after abandonment enables us to uncover how ordinary people experiment and improvise, developing coping strategies designed to substitute ingenuity for the lack of resources and institutional support.
Three neighborhoods targeted under the 2012 Detroit Future City Framework as High Vacancy Zones are the sites of investigation: Brightmoor, Poletown East and Riverbend. By demarcating these areas as testbeds for production and ecological innovation, this philanthropy-sponsored effort set a 50-year scenario recasting these neighborhoods into seas of greenery. While setting the quest for a more sustainable future, the chronic lack of investment speak of different priorities. Yet, despite this legacy of lack of support, residents have instigated the emergence of alternative urban imaginaries.
These three neighborhoods are at once actual locations and imagined places, inextricably tied to distinct histories and identified as platforms for possible futures. They are enclaves of entrenched disadvantage, but the structural and social forces that produced these similar outcomes are not identical. To render visible the narratives of place in each neighborhood, we scrutinize a variety of source materials through provisional, critical cartographies that overlay official and unofficial planning documents, newspaper accounts, media commentaries, field visits and interviews with key informants.
Contested Urbanisms of Abandonment in the Seoul Architecture Biennial 2019
