De/Motown
What if Detroit, with it’s depopulated suburban neighborhoods and decaying infrastructure, were to contract, intentionally, into a series of nodes? We explore how urban living might look if the Detroit population were to reoccupy the skyscraper graveyard of the central business district. Stacking industrial, commercial, residential, and agricultural functions into these towers and connecting them at multiple levels with viaducts. The motor city ceases to need cars in this ultra-dense urban center.
REinhabitation
The experiment begins with an act of urban contraction.
Population departs from the feeble, dwindling fabric of suburban lots to reinhabit structures of massive bulk—factories, business districts, and mega-malls. Former components in the machine of the Motor City transform into independent arcologies that build on the unique possibilities of their preexisting structures.
The salvage industry flourishes as the city dismantles the uninhabited zones between the nodes. Detroit becomes a center, at least temporarily, for precious metals and recycled materials. Eventually, regrowth of the surrounding forest leads to a budding lumber industry.
The central business district is reinterpreted in section. In the old CBD, circulation was limited to street level, reinforcing corporate isolation and preventing interaction across lofted spaces. The oppressive, inefficient, and energy-intensive elevator is now replaced by a sloping viaduct that connects the towers and makes movement between elevated levels possible. , Suspended off the skyscraper cores, this extension of the street coils around the CBD, crossing itself several times to form a lattice-work of external movement, connecting seamlessly to ground transport (rail, pedestrial, bicycle).
A New Typology
Lateral communication at multiple levels brings an urbanity to formerly-stratified, isolated spaces inside the towers. Vertical mechanical conduits, once limiting floorplans to a repeating type, can now be re-routed laterally, allowing for greater diversity of spaces and programs.
Self-Sustaining Urban Center
Notions of center and periphery are applied in section: civic, commercial, and educational facilities stand about the grand viaduct, the piano nobile of the city. Apartments, offices, and studios take advantage of the light above.
Traditionally peripheral programs—agriculture, industry, and energy—are located on the opposite extremes of the section. Industries form a band of continuous activity below the coil and hydroponic farms proliferate the highest strata.
As with many industrial cities, the massive scale of Detroit’s defunct commercial, industrial, and residential infrastructure is the greatest impediment to its renewal. The proliferation of abandoned urban space has created a new frontier, one that possesses existing structural resources that may support further development. By considering Detroit as an urban found-object, we propose the utilization of the existent city as natural resource that can be exploited to reshape the landscape and reinvent the ways in which humans settle their environment.