Detroit Future City

Detroit has created a long-term framework and city plan to create a more engaged and successful city, attempt to bring Detroit at least a little bit of the glory that existed back in the 50's and 60's.  It is a huge document with a new website to go along with it, so I will likely spend a good part of my day exploring it, but I hope it can teach me some lessons about what another shrinking city is doing for community improvement projects (or maybe more importantly, still not doing)

One thing I will definitely have to keep reminding myself though, is that this project was done by many many people over multiple years.  It is not someones capstone project, and I will NOT be creating a document like this for Cleveland.

See the website/links to the future plan here.

Now and Then

A really great way to illustrate history and site experience through photography.  My adventures through historical records at the Cleveland Public Library this week will hopefully uncover some things that make this a book/board possibility for my capstone.

Forward Movement

Its been a month, and I have made some big strides towards my final capstone research question.  I've almost picked a site!  When I am in CLE next week for our Thanksgiving holiday, I have two goals: eat mashed potatoes and find a few block site in a neighborhood of Cleveland to use as my capstone canvas.  Below you can read my most recent proposal "draft" (aka ramblings).  

When I wrote this draft, I had just started to narrow down by site qualities, and at this point, I think i am almost set on choosing a neighborhood in Cleveland. I always made fun of my moms bumper sticker ("My heart's in Cleveland"), but I do understand the love of the CLE, and why not apply my knowledge earned over years of hard work to a place with such great potential?

Here goes nothin'

Elevator Pitch:  Take a quarter square mile (or a specific urban fringe neighborhood) site that has been dramatically cleared because of foreclosures after shrinking populations and renew a sense of place and a sense of community on multiple scales.  The site must be on an urban fringe, and will therefore be reconnected through design to an intact community via human interaction scale, landscape scale, and economic scale

Important Site Qualities:

suffering from a shrinking population because of a loss of industry or change in economic impacter to the city

on the fringe of a currently developed area with an intact community structure

exhibit an excess of open space because of abandoned building tear down

In the past few years foreclosures have rattled communities across the globe.  Communities entire structures are changed by the shrinking of populations and changing of economic climates.  Within shrinking communities homes and in extreme cases entire blocks can become abandoned.  Abandonment of homes leads to a multitude of problems; fewer “eyes on the street,” built structures falling apart, dangerous untamed natural areas, community disconnection, fewer tax payers to support public works, schools and other amenities, and expensive infrastructure traveling out to areas that are no longer in need, etc.  To limit the danger of decrepit buildings being left to rot, and possibly pose danger for people still residing in the neighborhoods affected, cities are spending billions of dollars to tear down foreclosed and abandoned homes.  What is left are communities with an excess of open space and declining opportunities for human interaction.

This excess of open space that is created will be my capstone canvas.  I will be taking a quarter square mile (or a specific urban fringe neighborhood) site that has been dramatically cleared because of foreclosures after shrinking populations and renew a sense of place and a sense of community on multiple scales.  The site will be reconnected through design to an intact community via human interaction scale, landscape scale, and economic scale.

Research Questions:

How can landscape architecture work to renew a sense of community in a place that has been lost?  How is that sense of community created?  This question is one that has been a motivator for landscape architects for generations.  Since the beginning of the profession a main goal has been using the landscape to create spaces people want to inhabit or inhabit in specific ways. 

How can open space in debilitated communities be used to successfully create informal economies and a better quality of life for a neighborhoods inhabitants while also reconnecting said community to an existing formal economy and developed area.

The kinds of problem spaces I am tackling in my capstone will be an issue for years to come as population needs change and best-laid plans go to waste.  Solutions on how to strengthen communities and creative ways to reconnect lost places into the common society grid will be necessary until all development is deemed “resilient.”

The research I have done up to this point has been narrowing my focus and creating a backdrop from which I will be able to design.  Programming needs have become more apparent as I move through my research, but I have yet to arrive at a point where I feel comfortable physically designing on a site.  I see myself choosing a site over the Thanksgiving break when I will have chances to explore possible site opportunities in Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo.  Once the site is chosen, I look forward to being able to apply all of the research I have completed up to this point, and begin to understand all that was written in combination with the physicalities of the site.

Research Topics:

  • Causes behind the foreclosure crisis
  • Affects of foreclosure on communities across the globe
  • Informal economies in developing countries
  • Previously used solutions for reconnecting communities
  • Historic planning practices for suburban development
  • Greenways and ecological habitat in urban areas
  • Shrinking cities past and present
  • Infrastructure connections in urban areas
  • Shared infrastructure

Program Goals:

  • Renew a sense of place
  • Increase quality of life
  • Connect to developed economy
  • Connect to exisiting community
  • Connect regionally to alternative modes of transportation
  • Move away from a car based structure
  • Use “new” greenfield space to support human + non-human habitat
  • Create a resilient way of life
  • Create a flexible scaffolding off of which to build that accommodates changing needs

Important Definitions

Foreclosure - a bank or other secured creditor selling or repossessing a parcel of real property (immovable property) after the owner has failed to comply with an agreement between the lender and borrower called a "mortgage" or "deed of trust."

Abandonment – something abandoned by its owner with the intention of not retaking it

Community -  a social unit larger than a small village that shares common values

human interaction scale – the level of community at which people have day to day and human to human contact, interactions

landscape scale – a understand of the landscape that combines both the lands physical origins and the cultural overlay of human presence

economic scale – the level of community at which money is passed and humans make a livelihood

urban fringe - the transition zone where densely urban and suburban areas clash

excess open space – landscape parcels with no program and no necessary need at this point in time in a certain neighborhood

1/222

according to data from realty trac, 1 in every 222 housing units in euclid, ohio is foreclosed.  1 in every 375 housing units in cuyahoga county is foreclosed.

yea i'd say thats a problem.

MoMA

the museum of modern art in NYC had an exhibit the summer of 2011 focused around foreclosure and the changing american landscape.​

​"Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream," explored projects in five struggling urban fringe areas around the continental USA.  This project gives me lots to work with and has created this question:  "why does the solution need to focus around housing?  if people really need more housing why is there so much vacancy in these areas? how can I use the LANDSCAPE to create community and a sense of place?  how can I take this forgotten space and give it a second (third, fourth) chance to be great by forgiving the poor planning decisions made in the past and create modern 'garden-city' type solutions?  how can i reIGNITE the american dream of urban life nestled in nature?" ​  (ok so that was more than one question...sue me.)

check it.​

_________

​"Blanks."  These are going to play a big part in my entire capstone process; both asking questions with blanks in them, writing statements with blanks in them to act as a question, and acting as physical spaces I will actually be designing.  Also, may play a big part in my layout ideas if all goes as planned.

​My first "blank" :  

Create connections around cultural centers, create connections in neighborhoods that have gone without public help or funding for years, overall: minimize edge conditions in the urban inner city and urban fringe using _____________.

​Food for thought.

finally getting somewhere

​After some feedback from my pp professor and a few hours of chatting with classmates, friends, and family members, I think I am finally reaching a really interesting jumping off point.  YAYYYYYYYYYYYFKJSHKJDHSKJDHKSHDKJSHDKJSHDFKS:FH"O THANK GOODNESS.

Here is a quick straight-from-my-brain description of what I think could be my project area:

I am interested in the forgotten or bare space in urban fringe or inner city urban developments.  I am especially interested in minimizing edge effects between neighborhoods, for people and non-humans.    My professor mentioned I should start researching classic greenways and garden cities, (Letchworth or Welwyn), think back to our travels through Copenhagen and Almere,  as well as looking into the haphazard non-planned green space that pops up in many US cities (Los Angeles around the river, or Brooklyn Bridge Park).  I have started to research in that direction and also foresee an actual direction/idea coming into play.  Thinking about the unplanned nature of a lot of "parks" and chatting with my dad I was reminded of the unplanned (kind-of?) nature of blank space in many cities as a result of the recession and foreclosures (specifically rust-belt cities).  I am now going to start researching ideas surrounding the foreclosure of homes, what happens to the spaces left behind, if there are any more economical ways of demolishing these homes, as it is costing cities and will cost cities billions of dollars to just create blank space.  (how blank is it....really?)  This also made me think a little about New Orleans and the bare space left behind in the lower 9th ward, and how any solutions created could possibly also be applied to areas after disaster.  It could be a way of finding a positive in a negative situation or using a bad situation to then create highly improved connections and new opportunities within city plans of yore.  In essence, take the standard web setup of many cities, look at the in between spots, and create a new/improve on a system that will turn the web into a net.​

Some other questions I will also begin to ask as I dive into precedent studies and lots of reading are if patches are effective in changing the habitat for non-humans? Is this enough or do we have to rethink the field of urban space (i.e. all urban space as potential habitat and greenspace) by radically re-imagining what we think of as park etc?  (those are both from my professor and I think could lead to really cool discoveries)

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So thats where I am right now...about 4 days later than I should be, but hey at least I got somewhere.  I am working on my own schedule, cause Capstone is all about me in the end, right?​

​-Kammeron

Peer Review Process

For the project programming class I wrote about earlier, we have small groups called our peer review groups we meet with once a week and chat about the assignment we have turned in/where our project is/our thoughts/bitch about stuff.  After our last peer review process I collected these notes and now need to apply them to the areas of interest I wrote about before.  I know the peer review process is going to be integral in me finding my way through all this, AND I really love helping other people sort through all their mind lint to find an exciting and thought provoking process (seriously, its so fun working with and watching someones eyes light up as their idea comes together).​

​My notes:

barriers + hopelessness = attempt to fix these problems through landscape architecture

a lot of physical spaces in cities are easy to forget.  There is no memory created by being on/in/around the space.  Other places have natural deep meaning associated with them.  How can landscape architecture find a physical spaces memory and enhance it or make it visible to the everyday user?

Recognize that it is not just underprivileged areas/communities that have barriers between memory/use of space and the space itself.  Expensive, award winning new parks exist in some places that do not get any use.  Are those not fulfilling a community need?  Study the culture of the place where the site is and their feelings about nature/outdoor space/community gathering/sharing. 

Goals:

  • Create new spaces
  • Create new experiences
  • Bring people in (eyes on the “street”
  • Change actions in a space and reactions to a space
  • Attempt to change sense of community
  • Recognize community barriers that may exist
    • Physical
    • Emotional
    • Cultural
  • Design to break though social, political, economic barriers
  • What “patch” of the mosaic is the keystone patch, where to bring [people] in
  • Recognize any kind of disconnect in urban spaces
    • Sight lines
    • Sidewalks ending
    • Railroads
    • Safety barriers
    • Residential districts vs industrial
    • Regional corridor disconnects
  • Map the disconnects
  • Understand the experiences of a space to find these disconnects
  • Study the urban fabric, mosaic, of a region
    • Look at this at a site scale
    • Look at this at an ecosystem scale
    • Species scale
    • Future growth [scale??]

​Something else I do a lot of while "discovering" in my design process is ask questions.  Question marks actually begin to mark the next direction I usually should take my research, I use them naturally when wondering about something, but they turn out to be a great way to go back and find interesting directions to possibly take my ideas.

First Draft

​You guys, this is hard.  I have started to collect my ideas into a possible project area, and my ideas are swirling, but have yet to land anywhere concrete.  

I want to focus on reconnecting an industrial or other “forgotten” landscape that occurs on an urban fringe to its community or surrounding communities.  I have been intrigued by waterfronts and other edge conditions around cities my whole life, and these landscapes were a major catalyst in my finding landscape architecture and deciding to leave the field of marketing to go to graduate school.  

Area of interest 1: Create inhabitable space through underused urban patches at multiple scales to rid neighborhoods of dangerous edge conditions. 

Using transportation, open space and improvement of habitat I hope to to take underused industrial landscapes and make them habitable again, by both humans and non-humans.­ The most important thing for me in this specific area of interest is the opportunity to reconnect neighborhoods on a small and large scale.  The image of an urban patchwork quilt comes to mind, and I picture patches in the quilt being not inhabitable.  My goal would then be to make inhabitable space through these patches at multiple scales to rid neighborhoods of dangerous edge conditions.  Solving the problem of a broken patchwork will improve person-to-person interaction on the site itself.  It will also improve upon larger regional connections. While the human connections and interactions are what will drive the need for improvement, I foresee the non-human habitat creation driving much of the detail work.  The idea of a completely new “green-belt” does not interest me as much as a connection woven into the urban fabric.  Bits of habitat creation and beautification marking improved ways of traveling through a neighborhood or neighborhoods. Something that pops out for me is the idea that the remnants of industrial spaces are beautiful.  Smoke stacks, chain link fence and rusted pipes can be a beautiful background for native plantings and usable parkland.  This idea seems to pigeonhole me a bit into a space that must have ruins, but I think I can use my interest in this to portray the idea that an “ugly” unused space would really spark my interest. 

Area of Interest 2:  Create unique schoolyard improvements using unique materials and habitat creation.

A  book, "Asphalt to Ecosystems: Design Ideas for Schoolyard Transformation" sparked in me a project idea I think could combine many of the things I am interested in.  It takes the idea of strengthening neighborhood, habitat and human connections to a smaller scale. Brainstorming the idea of ‘forgotten,’ I came up with an image in my head of crumbling buildings, cracked asphalt, and weed ecosystems.  Reading about the Asphalt to Ecosystems book, I was drawn to the image of a paved schoolyard with nothing but a paved square and a chain link fence. From the case studies focused on in the book, I believe there could be an underserved population of schoolyards that need some love.  Many schools around the nation in the past 20 years have cut funding and lost arts programs, music programs, and many creative outlets for elementary and middle school children.  I am interested in doing some research to see if a possible inexpensive solution could lie in their schoolyards.   Working with a handful of schools in an urban environment, I would like to create inexpensive ways to improve the outdoor education of children.  The schoolyards could become a place to begin urban habitat creation, and become a link in strengthened neighborhood and regional connections.  This would necessitate creative planting design, use of materials and easy to understand application procedures.

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Process Map

As a final-year graduate design student, you must be aware of the process or processes you follow when working on a project, in other words, where do you start, what information do you privilege? Do you write your design, do you draw your design, do you talk your design? Which drawings come first? This assignment requires an explicit acknowledgment of your personal design process. Map all inputs and outputs of your design process (phases, time, information intake and output, feedback loops, external critics, software, hardware, sleep habits, food, hygiene, chemistry, etc.). This mapping must spatial, and temporal, and processual (some combination of all three). In other words, where do you work, at what times do you work, and how do you work. The map is a critique of your design process and must acknowledge both positive (things that work) and negative (things that don’t work) aspects of your process.

Deliverable: 11 x 17 graphic map in PDF format.

​

Mapping my design process was an interesting project, as I was going through the things I was mapping as I was mapping them.  I see my design process as being mostly discovery, often working in circular thought processes with outside critique from either professors, professionals, classmates, family or friends being the catalyst that shoots me on to new ideas and heightened motivation or shoots me finally into the creation phase.  Something that I am struggling with during this whole capstone process is the ​idea of starting from scratch. Even in my diagram I start it with "assignment given."  Well in this case we aren't given any direction, we are just told to come up with a project, somewhere in the field of landscape architecture, that can be finished in a semester. Hmmmmm.......

I know that the beginning of basically any process of mine is always a challenge, and I hope paying attention to that this semester I can somehow learn ways to more quickly jump into a project.​

My map, like I said, highlighted the importance of critique in my work​.  I have to force myself to recognize this point and not be afraid to ask for multiple critiques, even when they are not offered or I am afraid of the outcome.  Just do it!

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Project Programming

One of the classes we are required to take this semester is called Project Programming.  It is the scheduled process of discovering what we will study for our final graduate school project.  It is 1 credit, but as our professor Vince told us the first class meeting, it will require about 4 credits worth of work.  Standard design school principles.  ​

​I have pasted the class description and what we will end up creating below.  This "capstone" blog will essentially follow my progress in this class as well as my Research Methods course.

The Capstone Process

LA8554, Project Programming, is one of two fall courses preparing students for the spring semester Capstone Studio. The Research Methods and the Project Programming courses are essential to the definition and development of the Capstone Project. In Project Programming the coursework focuses on defining the research and design scope of the project, and gathering and developing site materials for the Capstone Studio. Ideally, after a semester of preparation in LA8554, you have been defined and developed your project to the point that design vwork can begin immediately at start of the Spring Semester.In preparation for Capstone Studio, this semester will emphasize the development of a comprehensive Capstone Proposal in the form of a book. Faculty committee’s will use the Proposal Book to become familiar with, review, and approve the Capstone project.

The final Proposal Book will contain the following:

1. A clear and concise introduction to the capstone book with a table of contents.

2. A clear and concise description of the concept or concepts (technical, biological, political, cultural, etc.) influencing the project, and the limits of your investigation of the concepts (scope of work). These concepts may be either theoretical and/or technical (biotic or other processes, economic theory, social theory, political theory, etc.).

3. A clear description of the site (material, social, political, economic, and cultural qualities) and relationship of the site to concepts to be explored. This description must include a visual record of the site from different time periods (sketches, photographs, maps, etc.). Depending on the project, an analysis of the site’s history may also be needed. You must explicitly link the site’s history to the concepts to be explored.

4. The existing and proposed land use(s) and/or site programs for the project and the relationship of the programs or land use(s) to the concepts under exploration. This section must include a detailed description of the proposed activities/uses and the spatial requirements for each.

5. A complete inventory of the site materials for the project (list of materials required, sources, format of materials, availability, and materials procured).

6. Annotated bibliography (list of references and relationship of the reference to the project). The bibliography must also include significant visual assets (maps, video, film, photography, or paintings) that are important to the project (for example, references to Thomas Cole’s work if exploring the American picturesque).

7. Process schedule and scope of work (scope of work, timeline to achieve scope, and process used to achieve scope).

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capstoneeee

Cue the Imperial March, it has begun.  The fall semester of my last year of graduate school started out with a bang. I am already tired.  Here on this capstone blog site I am hoping to keep in one spot all my rambling thoughts about my possible capstone project. Its going to get weird, and probably will be pretttay random in the timing of posts, but I need a place other than notebooks to keep my thoughts, because, well, I don't keep notebooks very well organized.  Here goes nothin'!

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