Liquid Planning
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ARCH 505 | URP 515 | FALL 2012 TAUBMAN COLLEGE OF ARCHITECTURE + URBAN PLANNING - THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
Focus Area Study within Hope Village, Detroit, Michigan
Study model from Liquid Planning
COURSE INSTRUCTORS Maria Arquero, Assistant Professor of Urban and Regional Planning (marquero@umich.edu) Jen Maigret, Assistant Professor of Architecture (maigretj@umich.edu) COURSE INFORMATION Thursdays (9:00am - 12:00pm) Duderstadt Center Windows Training Room 3 (3336 BD)
COURSE OVERVIEW
Located in one of the most polluted watersheds in the Great Lakes Region, the Detroit metropolitan region is in a unique position to challenge the course of its inherited system of water infrastructure. In order to do so, multiple design disciplines must collaborate through a multi scalar approach to stormwater management. From the scale of massive infrastructural works to the surfaces of residential rooftops, Liquid Planning practices interdisciplinary design research methods to call into consideration new approaches to Detroit’s complex stormwater network. Lying at the crux of this are Detroit’s patterns and materials of urbanization. Today, the city’s shrinking population can no longer afford large-scale infrastructural solutions to storm water management. In turn, approaches that operate between the scale of neighborhoods and building assemblies position environmental design expertise at the forefront of a new hydrophilic urbanism paradigm. Liquid Planning posits that design research, informed by cartographies, calculations and cultural ambitions, is the key to an integrated approach to problems with high degrees of interconnectivity and scalar multiplicity. Liquid Planning, Fall 2012, will participate in the Play&Grounds component of the “Sustainability and the HOPE Village Initiative,” a unique collaboration between the University of Michigan’s Graham Environmental Sustainability Institute and Focus:HOPE, a non-profit organization based in Detroit. The class will participate in design research towards an integrated open space network in HOPE Village and as part of this, will benefit from an organized tour of the HOPE Village, data from active research, and exposure to an Integrated Assessment (IA) approach to design. The class will integrate readings, invited guest lectures, discussions, design exercises and software tutorials (ArcGIS and Rhino) across three assignments. Lectures will include several invited specialists considering watershed resource planning and management from other disciplinary points of view. Tutorials will teach how to use software critically, thereby enabling an innovative approach to input, analysis and output of data through the specific parameters of research questions. Students will be expected to produce cartographies, visual representations, laser cut models, and succinct texts to convey information associated with complex problems with precision and clarity to a wider audience. All three assignments will be organized as group work (in multidisciplinary teams of 2-4) thereby facilitating collaboration and prioritizing approaches and methods that rely on mulitple expertise at all stages of design.