Access for All

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Access For All

The fundamental ambition of CCPI is to create accessible design that takes all users into account and reimagines universal accommodation as an integral and beautiful feature, not as an add-on or burden. By considering everyone’s needs, design becomes more, rather than less, appealing and inventive. It shows how space can sponsor activity across generations, social groups, physical experiences, and economic categories. Each design decision is based on an aspiration

to achieve flexibility, offer choices, guarantee welcome, create spaces for conviviality, and remove the barriers that keep us apart.

Above: Proposed ephemeral programming on the Band showcases the capacity of the lighting plan to support large scale events. Here, Woodward Avenue is transformed into a plaza. Next Page: Lighting plan for the District by 8’18” Lumiere highlights CCPI’s landscape elements.

Light Up

Designed by Paris-based firm 8’18” Lumière, the lighting plan offers an adaptable, digital ecology for Detroit’s Cultural District that links all institutions with common lighting elements, while preserving and emphasizing the specificities, functions, and architectural qualities of each.

Enhancing existing conditions and activating new elements, the plan incorporates architecture, new structures, and diverse landscapes, while acknowledging the need for flexibility and adaptation. The design highlights functional lighting around the Square and atmospheric lighting along the Necklace. It offers lighting effects to highlight architecture, treescapes, and institutional thresholds. Lighting on the Band, with its series of flexible plazas, is designed to accommodate a breadth of events. Here the lighting offers strategies that can emphasize large scale gatherings or ensure safety and tranquility on ordinary days.

The lighting plan is seasonally responsive. Using adjustable lighting temperatures, the system is designed to accentuate the natural features of the canopy and ground vegetation, and to extend alluring visual qualities of dusk and dawn as they vary throughout the year. The design’s affection for flora and fauna is more than cosmetic, however. The lighting takes light pollution and bird migration into consideration, creating a modifiable system that is as efficient as it is focused on mitigating ecological impacts.

The lighting plan operates by introducing intelligent fixtures, programmed to respond to changes in weather conditions, times of day, and the astronomical clock. Through the use of controlled photometry, the approach lowers energy consumption while amplifying visual and atmospheric effects. The system also integrates data transmission and ensures security. The lighting plan merges WiFi and LiFi technologies in order to link people to institutions, information, and each other. This is particularly meaningful in a city where

The lighting concept comes from the desire to create unobstructed views of the District. Seeking to link institutions and landscapes, while ensuring diversity of experience, the lighting plan considers existing architecture and projects a functional and adaptable future. It is a digital ecology designed to animate the “ district using modular parts that treat the city as a stage.

Remy Civitella Principal, 8’18” Lumiere

close to half of the population does not benefit from consistent access to the internet.

Integrating signage, sound systems, and video projection into the lighting scheme allows for an extra layer of interactivity. Light and sound accommodate an ever transforming cultural eventscape with a number of possible artistic inputs and environments. Dynamic lighting on the facades of buildings and ground surfaces is made possible by integrating projection mapping capabilities to activate key locations around the District.

The lighting plan is informed by the iconographic architecture of the District, and works to amplify the unique character of each building by highlighting the rhythms of windows and ornament. In this approach, familiar structures become dynamic urban markers welcoming visitors time and again. The lighting plan accounts for human, institutional and ecological appropriation, taking people, animals, vegetation, and cultural production into account. In the process it offers comfort, adaptation, playability and ambiance, through a lighting scheme that highlights the best attributes of public space design. Beyond poetics, of course, the system integrates functional, material solutions to create the digital “ infrastructure necessary to access information, connect, and recharge.

Salome Loyer Project Manager, 8’18” Lumiere

Digital Strategy

The Digital Strategy Plan creates a vision and set of principles for the equitable development of digital capacities for the Detroit Cultural District, centered on digital infrastructure, digital transformation, and creative visitor experiences. Engaged by Midtown Detroit Inc., rootoftwo, the Detroit-based, civic future-making practice of Cézanne Charles and John Marshall, led the digital strategy. To ensure it was deeply rooted in Detroit art and culture, the team worked with the district institutions, residents, visitors, artists, stakeholders, partners and others.

Technology should be a point of inclusion. Detroit is one of the least connected cities and significantly, residents in Midtown also have low rates of access to broadband internet in the home. As a result of the digital strategy planning work with rootoftwo, MDI and Wayne State University formed a new partnership in collaboration with the institutions to establish reliable and fast outdoor Wi-Fi as a free, public amenity across the district.

rootoftwo led discussions with local, national and international thought-leaders to guide the digital transformation work - resulting in a set of rights & principles that consider the impact of data collection, analysis, and distribution on our collective cultural, social, and ethical values. The strategy also identifies opportunities to build digital capacity and communications with the district institutions. Ultimately, the strategy highlights the Dlectricity festival produced by MDI and the work of several institutions in the district. Collectively, these projects provide compelling experiences, digital programming and new collaborations that activate the outdoor spaces and connect to audiences across the city and region.

We envision the Detroit Cultural District as a place where artists, cultural and educational institutions, visitors, and residents can explore new pathways for digital expression, storytelling, and inclusion. The strategy aims to build resilient, equitable and inclusive models for digital transformation and infrastructure. “

Cézanne Charles & John Marshall Partners, rootoftwo

East Kirby Street lighting plan with integrated WiFi and technology.

The proposed Arts Vitrine and Welcome Center on Brush Street provides an engaging entry into the District for pedestrians or those arriving by car via the new underground car park. The space works like a switchboard, helping guide visitors on their journeys throughout the District. Exhibitions and events will be co-curated by the District’s stakeholder institutions and the governing entity.

Movement & Access

Getting to and moving freely around the District is a fundamental requirement for the plan. Yet how we get there, how we access the resources on site, and the affiliated costs of staying can be a hotly debated topic. Every resident engaged on the subject has strong feelings about arriving and connecting to the District. Impressions are often based on connections to transportation networks; available vehicles; fees for parking; access to services and commerce; and other perceptual considerations about comfort and efficiency.

Mobility, in this sense, is directly related to access and social inclusion. Appropriately, CCPI addresses questions of urban mobility and access in a holistic and comprehensive manner. The plan embraces the importance of providing access to culture and leisure so that everyone can enjoy the city’s resources.

CCPI’s approach to mobility planning is not considered in isolation, limited to a problem of public transport, engineering, or travel efficiency. It is integrated into a reflection on the urban totality, including its complexities and contradictions, and the inequalities that manifest themselves in the city. It considers Detroit’s intense climate, historical affinity for the automobile, and embellishment of street proportions prior to evaluating the impacts of any urban transformation. It figures the coded requirements of universal access and the perceived convenience of connecting to thresholds. Most importantly, urban mobility is not limited to the way people move or access the District. It includes the intangible aspirations of social mobility through programs, atmosphere, and spatial opportunities that invite interaction with a fairer city and a better society.

The Mobility + Access and Parking booklets take deeper dives into the statistical measures and attributes of the mobility and parking proposals, unpacking the numbers behind the robust feasibility studies accompanying the plan. Likewise, the publications look closer at the District’s connections to public transportation and future mobility networks. In this section, CCPI introduces the idea of strategic parking consolidation, creating access points in and out of the District by coupling art interventions and public programs with the efficiency of underground parking garages.

Proposed Brush Street Arts Vitrine and Welcome Center connected to the District’s new underground car park holds exhibitions, public programs, and outdoor gathering spaces on the public roof deck.