Form Framing Place

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Form Framing Place

Nelson, Madison

URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10429/2446

Date: 2023-04-28

Abstract:

The Core City neighborhood, like many other neighborhoods in Detroit, is characterized by a vast number of single-family houses. However, many of these houses were destroyed during the 1967 Detroit riots, which left numerous vacant lots throughout the neighborhood. In contrast, cities such as Boston, Massachusetts; Warsaw, Poland; Copenhagen, Denmark; and Florence, Italy have dense urban forms with diverse housing types. In these cities, a wide range of housing options are available, including multi-family housing, townhouses, and apartments. To address the lack of housing diversity in the Detroit Core City neighborhood, a proposal has been created to implement a Form Framing Place strategy. This strategy involves implementing new urban forms that bring in new diversity and density through people and buildings. This strategy aims to create a more diverse and sustainable neighborhood that offers a range of housing options for people of different ages, incomes, and lifestyles. This will be achieved through the development of mixed-use buildings, townhouses, and apartments that can accommodate a range of household sizes and needs. The strategy also involves the creation of public spaces, such as parks and plazas, that provide opportunities for social interaction and community engagement. Overall, the Form Framing Place strategy in the Detroit Core City neighborhood aims to revitalize the area and create a more diverse and sustainable urban environment. This strategy will break the monolithic zoning code of single family housing by incorporating a range of housing options and public spaces. By doing so, the neighborhood will become more self-sustaining and resilient to future changes.

Description:

Can a diverse range of housing forms, such as “Missing Middle” housing, attract residents to Detroit? This thesis will investigate precedents of various urban typologies to formulate a proposal of intervention for Core City, a depopulated neighborhood in Detroit. Cities including Boston, Copenhagen, Florence, and Warsaw were used as case studies to explore urban design principles. Population density and building typologies work towards the formulation of new housing typology design for future interventions in Detroit. Framing concepts for this thesis includes density, urban form, typology, and urban context of Detroit. Nicola Dempsey, in her article “Components of Urban Form”, defines urban density as “the concentration of people, employment, housing units, building floor area, or some other measure of human occupancy, activity, and development across a certain unit of land.” It essentially refers to the degree of population or development concentration or compactness in a city. On the other hand, urban form refers to the physical characteristics of built-up areas, such as the size, shape, density, and arrangement of places. This is a consistent term referenced by urban planners Geoff Boeing and Kevin Lynch. Urban form relates to the type of program it consists of, such as building typology. Typology is the process of recognizing and classifying structures and urban settings based on how similar their primary characteristics are. Examples of housing typologies include single family houses, duplex, multiplex, townhouse, row house, and apartments. The typical housing types in Detroit include single family houses and apartment buildings, and are lacking Missing Middle Housing. The term “Missing Middle” was coined by architect and urban planner, David Parolek, who states that “Missing Middle Housing is a range of house-scale buildings with multiple units—compatible in scale and form with detached single-family homes—located in a walkable neighborhood.” This concept can start to be applied to an urban context, specifically Detroit. A project that has implemented the concept of “Missing Middle” housing in Detroit is called City Modern in Brush Park. The interest of this study is to rework the urban environment of Core City, a Detroit neighborhood, to include an exploration of housing from other cities’ urban design principles. Detroit has gone through an extensive decline over the past 50 years. According to an article called “Detroit, an Abandoned City”, there are “70,000 buildings, 31,000 homes, and 90,000 vacant lots abandoned in Detroit.” The current status of many Detroit neighborhood homes are abandoned and vacant, but can be revitalized for future use. These buildings hold the architectural character and history of the city and are an opportunity for reuse and revitalization within Detroit. Analyzing the urban fabric of cities’ in the United States and Europe allows for comparisons of urban density, through understanding the built environment. Boston, Copenhagen, Florence, and Warsaw, are all cities that display a compact way of living sustained through the design of the urban form. The street-scapes are dense and tightly designed to include all forms of travel, such as foot traffic, cycling, and vehicular traffic. The building typology also allows for compact living of these cities to flourish by providing many of the residents daily resources in a close proximity. The levels of sustainability and accessibility that can be observed in the dense urban fabric of the selected cities, will help teach designers how to solve issues in blighted neighborhoods. Detroit consists of a vast number of single family houses and is lacking middle housing types throughout the city. The proposal is aimed to create an urban master plan in the Core City neighborhood in Detroit. This proposal will provide a framework for city planners and designers to aim to bring back residents into the city through implementing new housing forms, such as duplexes, multiplexes, and row houses. Studying the urban fabric of other cities’ will allow for implementation of these principles to the context of Detroit. Different sites within the cities can be investigated through the urban form of figure ground mapping studies by learning and comprehending built forms as a preliminary way to understanding the urban environment of the chosen cities. These figure grounds made it possible to comprehend the differences in spatial features between built and unbuilt forms.This led to developing the figure ground maps further to understand the building typologies in the area, specifically the typical housing type known to that specific city. Through mapping, the spatial characteristics and scale are visible, as well as the implications in the chosen cities by retrieving photos of the various dwelling typologies. Additionally, a project called City Modern in Brush Park, is a desirable initiative in Detroit. This project is a tool and reference for this research because it incorporates a wide variety of housing typologies to suit a variety of people. Detroit has had a loss of residents and went through depopulation throughout the city. This has caused abandonment and neighborhoods filled with blight. These neighborhoods typically consist of single family houses, amplifying the lack of diverse housing typologies throughout the city. This is also connected to density and the underlying factor of the city of Detroit as a whole being less dense throughout the neighborhoods, lacking in different opportunities for numerous types of housing. Using other cities as precedents can allow for bringing forth concepts and frameworks to bring to Detroit. The selected cities that were analyzed were chosen because of their diverse range of housing typologies, which differ from Detroit. The studies of the selected cities are subjective and could have been chosen through a given framework that is more appropriate and has a similar history to the city of Detroit. There are more solutions to the revival of Detroit than just implementing a diverse range of housing typologies. It’s important to implement public space and “unbuilt” forms, in addition to the various housing types. Allowing for additional time to further the analysis of these public spaces will allow for an improved proposed intervention. Since a classmate’s topic, Odette Giorgees, focuses specifically on these third places, merging our topics together will allow for us to cross ideas and work together to create a more developed project. Researching and analyzing cities as precedents is an essential aspect of urban design and planning. By looking at successful examples of diverse housing types, designers and urban planners can gain insights into effective strategies and tactics for creating more inclusive and equitable urban environments. This process is particularly important for cities that lack diverse housing options, such as Detroit, which has long struggled with issues of blight, disinvestment, and a lack of affordable housing.

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