PRUNING DETROIT (2010)
This project re-examines the city of Detroit from the cultural framework of the automobile, which has had a major impact in the rapid development and subsequent decline of its host city. Detroit currently covers approximately 140 square miles with around 900,000 residents. This is less than half of its peak population half a century ago. As a result, the existing infrastructural base cannot be sustainably maintained with a diminishing population.
Detroit’s situation is not unusual but the scale of its condition is, creating a unique challenge. There are an estimated 40 square miles of vacant land in the city. Large sections of the city’s population are low income, low education, and minority demographics. A major portion of the city’s population does not own a car.
These factors combine with others to create self-reinforcing feedback loops of disinvestment and diminishing population. Current initiatives and discussions to demolish abandoned structures, buy out isolated residents, and revitalize certain neighborhoods do not match the magnitude of the problem. What if the city radically retracted the physical extents of its services, focusing on what it is able to support? It could undergo a critical pruning process, focus its resources, and re-make itself as a new, new Detroit.
Places to Intervene in a System
This project is underpinned by Donella Meadows' proposition that there is a hierarchy of leverage points where one can effectively intervene and affect a system. This is Meadows' list of places to intervene in a system:
(in increasing order of effectiveness)
12. Constants, parameters, numbers (such as subsidies, taxes, standards).
11. The sizes of buffers and other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows.
10. The structure of material stocks and flows (such as transport networks, population age structures).
9. The lengths of delays, relative to the rate of system change.
8. The strength of negative feedback loops, relative to the impacts they are trying to correct against.
7. The gain around driving positive feedback loops.
6. The structure of information flows (who does and does not have access to information).
5. The rules of the system (such as incentives, punishments, constraints).
4. The power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure.
3. The goals of the system.
2. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters —arises.
1. The power to transcend paradigms.
Pruning Detroit is a thought experiment that lives in the space between points 2 and 3 in this list. In order to achieve a paradigmatic shift in the physical form of Detroit, we first zoom out to a high level cultural view surrounding the automobile, and then gradually step back down to the built form of the city.
Changing mindsets
It is well established that Detroit's glamorous rise in the first half of the 20th century and its almost equally rapid decline since then has been a by-product of the automobile mono-culture. Detroit's economy, people, urban fabric, physical and social infrastructures are pieces of a system built around the culture of the automobile. Therefore in order to meaningfully shift Detroit's trajectory, it is necessary to re-frame the mindset around the meaning of the car in today's culture and going forward.
Today's urban mobility challenges are partly precipitated by two factors, the first is a mindset that locates personal ownership of a car as an object of desire and achievement. The second factor is the inefficiency of the physical mass of a car relative to its capacity to move people or goods in an urban setting. Pruning Detroit proposes to re-frame the former while maintaining the context of the latter.
Cities evolve around access flows and mobility, which are informed by parameters such as geography, climate, technology, population growth, and specific uses. Development of early industrialized cities was initially informed by railroads that supported the flow of people and goods on an industrial scale. This dominance was later supplanted by the car that generally - but not universally - proved to be a more versatile mode of transport.
The car exists as a cultural icon of desire representing social status, personality, and freedom. Its subsequent ubiquity is shaping our physical environments that accommodate it through streets and highways, various forms of parking, gas stations, and drive-thrus. This mindset has resulted in a Detroit with an extensive car-centric infrastructure that the city is no longer able to sustain. Ironically, its socio-economic decline has resulted in over 30% of its residents unable to afford car ownership. Additionally, Detroit has a high concentration of young adults without higher education who represent significant untapped potential.
Car advertisements showcase cars cruising down open roads because cruising in comfort at freeway speeds over moderate distances is their optimal operating environment. While capable, cars are not optimized for - and lose their advantage in - urban settings with parking challenges, tighter lanes, slower speeds, shorter distances, and frequent stops. Cars and urban settings are not an ideal mix, therefore it makes sense to de-prioritize cars in such settings in favor of more, and more diverse modes of transport.
Below is a summary of the context surrounding this conversation. Most items have already been mentioned and one is yet to be addressed:
Large swaths of vacant and abandoned properties exist within the city.
Over 30% of residents do not own a car.
There is a large demographic of under-educated young adults (aged 18-22).
There are not enough resources to sustain all of Detroit's physical infrastructure and services.
The car's optimal operating environment is across medium distances at cruising speeds.
An extensive ecosystem of engineering, manufacturing, and support services still exists around the auto industry.
The last item in the above list is an important component that can be leveraged as a jumping off point for the creation of a parallel ecosystem of design, technology, fabrication, education, and training. The engineers and manufacturers already in the Detroit area can be tapped for their expertise and supply chain infrastructure in order to begin developing and fabricating new types of components and technologies for other industries, including the building industry. Knowledge of advanced manufacturing at scale, modular components, mass customization, and rapid re-tooling can be integrated with existing construction industry knowledge in order to achieve more efficient construction methods.
Pruning Detroit proposes to establish a mobile catalytic urban factory. It is a short-to-medium-term factory / vocational training school / entrepreneurial incubator. It will utilize empty lots in the city center to establish itself and to progressively begin activating and infilling neighboring empty lots.
This catalytic urban factory borrows from and taps into the existing auto manufacturing history and infrastructure - leveraging the ecosystem of surrounding fabricators to spin off a parallel industry of more diverse fabricators around new ways to “fabricate” buildings. This process also acts as training/apprenticeship/education model for unemployed and undereducated youth, a re-skilling center for underemployed auto-workers, and a mentorship center and incubator for building relationships between the former with the goal of helping new small business ventures to start up.
The ultimate goal for this catalytic factory will be to generate enough local critical mass to make itself no longer necessary, at which point it will pack up and relocate to another urban center to begin anew.