Motown Mobility Reimagining the American Dream of Suburbia in Detroit: Context Density is Destiny
360 sqkm land area
Fallen to 40% of population
Higher use and demand for automobiles
Automobile Industry Boom
More jobs and higher salary
Purchase of cars & houses in the suburbs
50 years ago
More infrastructure to support
Construction of highways & suburbs
Present-day Map of Detroit’s abandoned and industrial lots
Today
Detroit’s Urban Growth Model: Vicious cycle of sprawl and automobile dependency
5000 Officers <3 mile crime scene radius
3000 Officers
>7.5 mile crime scene radius
Difficult to implement municipal services
Industrial plots Unoccupied plots
Fire Department, trash collection, road maintenance, street lighting etc
Technology of the future for Problems from the Past The automobile of the past will be obsolete, And is being replaced with new, clean autonomous vehicles providing safer travel alternatives. Detroit, known as the motorcity for its historical role in automotive production, is now one of the frontliners for Autonomous vehicle development as well.
American Dream of Suburbia: Mass Production, Urban Sprawl & Oversized car-centric cities
This drastically changes the way we live and move, forcing us to rethink how humans and architecture can interface and evolve with this new technology. There are existing architectural projects exploring the new conditions that can be afforded, from autonomous living, to drive up spaces, travelling spaces, and economical usage. These advancements all gives ur grounds to rethink the way we build our cities and spaces. When it comes to living in America, we think of the suburbs, which is fraught with urban and sustainability issues. It has come to represent the endless, problematic growth and sprawl model of development in American cities, as well as political and social issues. It is built on the concept of mass produced homes, like how cars were produced, in sprawling pieces of land zoned purely for residential usage, built upon a vicious cycle of automobile depency, caused by the post-war industry and baby boom. The urban and social characteristics of the suburbs has been long entrenched in the American way of life, represented here by Levittown, one of the pioneering suburban model of development created by William Levitt in the late 50s. It features sprawling, single family homes made affordable via cheap mass production and attractive mortgage loans, driving masses of Americans to purchase these homes. It was the American dream to have your own piece of property and yard, along with a car in these car-centric developments. These suburbs are often characterised by big box stores, with even larger parking lots to accommodate the cars . 1:50 0M
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The wider metroplitan area is riddled with vacant property as most of Detroit’s population have fled to the wider suburbs. Public transit in the city is only available in the downtown area, with the wider parts relying heavily on cars to get around. For a sprawling, hollow city like 1:100 Detroit suffering from limited resources, Density is destiny for the sake of the efficient allocation of resources and safety. 0M
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The Packard Automotive plant was chosen as the project’sA intervention site due to it’s iconic reputation for being the epitome 1 1:200 of post-industrial decay and abandonment in a rust-belt city like Detroit. It sits in between two residential neighbourhoods 2 B that have vast amounts of vacant homes and many more slated for demolition, due to reasons like economic downturn, 3 C the lack of access to amenities, safety, suburban flight etc. These highly-layered issues mostly stem from the poor urban 1:50 structure of Detroit which was built automobile-boom economy. 4 D 1:250 to serve the 20th-century 0M
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Manufacturing Identity: Can we transform what was a factory for cars into one for the production and inhabitation of mobile homes?
Motown Mobility Reimagining the American Dream of Suburbia in Detroit: Proposal Abstract and Introduction The advent of autonomous electric vehicles in the near future will make the nature of mobile vehicles increasingly nebulous: what will be the difference between your living room and your car? This thesis posits that there will in fact be no difference – with the production and inhabitation of vehicles and homes mixed and no longer distinguished. This future implies a drastic change to our car-obsessed urban environment promising not only a more freely mobile future, but also one which permits us to redefine the sustainability of car culture and the suburban lifestyle.
Blight
Demolished Properties Slated for Demolition
This project thus questions if the new form of mobility explained earlier on can stitch spaces back together? It is mainly inspired by the idea of Woonerfs in the Netherlands, which translate to Living streets, where suburban neighbourhoods are far denser and sustainable, with common front yards and shared spaces for humans and vehicles to inhabit. This is crucial due to the fact that in typical metropolitan developments, vast amounts of building area are set aside for parking requirements, creating large, banal spaces that often feel dangerous and uninhabitable. The resulting form is a terracing groundscraper structure that seeks to take back the streets for the people in this industrial wasteland, along with attempting to establish a vertical suburban form instead of resorting to skyscrapers, which are often criticized at alienating people from street life and the city.
Programs
It also challenges the boundary between cities and suburbs, by re-introducing this suburban concept into Detroit’s wider metropoliton area. This strategy draws the suburban population back into the city, as a counter thesis to the suburban sprawl growth model the American typically adopts for housing. The houses and amenities will be built over the Packard automotive plant, which will be preserved and serve the development as a manufacturing and commercial hub. CO
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Apart from acting as a shared front yard for the homes, these long horizontal passageways, become social spaces like sidewalks or streets, rather than just circulation infrastructure. The insistent repetition of program calls for relief—for “spaces for doing nothing,” or rather, “spaces where anything can happen.” These spaces are essential for the social dynamic of buildings. Housing wise, we have a mix of vertically-stacked, 5 over 1 typology synced with the neo-suburban type. They are connected in a loop via the repeated hypercores, which hold both the housing and residential lifts, with recreational programs tucked underneath for easy access on both sides. Ample public space will be provided, and the repurposed plant will be used for commercial purposes like the big box stores that characterises suburbs, as well as for manufacturing the house units and extensions. This idea draws on the Packard plant’s historic industrial identity and a manufacturing plant for automobiles, projecting it into the future as an infrastructure for manufacturing autonomous homes and vehicles. These themes of industrial production is eomthing both the American suburbs and automobiles share. They are both mass-produced, sold in a catalogue and the modified by owners. This project takes a modern approach to this theme, by allowing residents to design/modify their homes and mobile rooms via an app and place a build order for it, which will then be sent to the manufacturing branch of the plant, where both the homes and mobile pods are manufactured for seamless integration. The completed pieces and pods will be sent upwards via a funicular straight from the factory, to be piece together on their allocated 7 by 8m lot. This forms new prototypologies that imagines how vehicles and homes can be seamlessly integrated and configured, with flexible modifiable options like roof and window types
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Communal Living and Sustainable Energy The community courtyard is designed as a central public space that will act as a market hall for the residents in the district, creating a more integrated social food place instead of the vast, banal fast food chain littered around the city. It features re-configurable mobile food store pods that can be adapted to hold seating areas on the mezzanine level or green roofs. The courtyard will also feature these mobile greenhouses that hang off of the vertical superstructure. This was inspired by the increasingly popular agrihood movement in Detroit where Detroiters transform vacant lands into farms to produce fresh foods for the city, as well as the typical suburban imagery of tending to your personal garden/ lawn. The provision of these mobile greenhouses inspire more residents to participate in the agricultural movement and grow fresh produce for the community too, as well as aid in the distribution of the produce, empowering the residents of Detroit that are trying combat the lack of fresh food supply in the city. Energy will be mainly derived via solar and hydro sources, captured by the pv canopies on the lower levels and tracking pv panels on the core roof. This helps to capture solar and hydroelectric power, as well as water supply, which wil be stored in batteries and water tanks, before being distributed via the integrated super structure to the homes and programs. Reimagining the Packard plant as a place for both production and living transforms its identity from an abandoned industrial site, to an inhabitable infrastructure for the city, whilst tackling some of the many issues which plagues the city. This is a counterthesis to the American sprawl model of growth, in hopes of giving back the land to the environment instead of constantly taking more.