Thinking Tiny

Abstract

This thesis focuses to ask multiple questions about residential community in Detroit, while simultaneously offering solutions to those questions. It is imperative that residential communities in Detroit are focused on and are the topic of discussion within the city because they are a large opportunity that some may overlook. Revitalizing a neighborhood not only affects those who live in it, but everyone that interacts with it as well. So, the first question arises, how do we as architects tackle the problem of community redevelopment? This question is not as transparent as it may seem as it is filled with issues of complexity, such as the socioeconomic issue of community and how growth will begin to spread in a neighborhood. Many factors influence a community and how it functions, which can be attributed to the success or failure of the community. These factors range in scale from neighbor to neighbor and how their interactions are, to the larger representation of how other communities view the community in which we choose to focus on. This begins to address another question; How do we affect the neighborhood on both a micro and a macro scale? It is important that we not only focus on the community itself, but the surrounding context and how that community will interact and be a part of, on a larger scale, the city of Detroit. Through the investigations and studies conducted in the following pages, this thesis begins to diagram a plan for revitalization of struggling Detroit Neighborhoods through the implementation of methods of interaction in the form of one lot tiny home community greenways.