Embracing Detroit's urban ruins
Date
2020-08-30
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Abstract
The current urban landscape of Detroit reflects the fallout from the city’s tumultuous
history of racial turmoil and social and spatial segregation. Since the “white flight”
to the suburbs of residents and the institutions they controlled, Detroit has become
an “urban prairie” characterized by the abandonment of factories and homes and
the accelerated decay and demolition of significant portions of the urban fabric. As a
counter-position to the city’s culturally and environmentally unsustainable “tear down”
culture, this thesis project proposes a ground-up approach to the adaptive reuse of
existing buildings by tapping into the poetic potential of the fragment, abandonment,
and material ruination as productive catalysts for urban revitalization, instead of as
evidence used to justify more demolition of the ‘unsightly.’ Drawing inspiration from
the 18th-century aesthetic valoration of the ruin, this thesis reimagines the Picturesque
for the 21st century in order to cultivate a new way of seeing and responding to
decrepit parts of the natural and built environment. Aligning itself with the surrounding
grassroots initiatives focused on urban agriculture, inclusive arts practices and public
green space to inform the proposed intervention’s hybrid program, this thesis aspires
to shifting perspectives of what is possible and desirable by offering a positive,
community-oriented response to a former industrial site that aims to contribute to
Detroit’s rebirth.
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Keywords
Adaptive reuse, architecture, collective memory, decay, de-industrialization, Detroit, Detroit riots, fragment, history, picturesque, racism, rebirth, romanticism, urban agribulture, urban revitalization, urban ruins, urban prairie, white flight