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Columbia Students and Faculty Complete First Detroit Collaboration

Written by Kirk Finkel and Richard Plunz, Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation

The Columbia University Urban Ecology Studio is an advanced design course for students in architecture, engineering, and urban planning, which focuses on urban development and its social and ecological impacts. The Fall Semester 2015 Studio worked in Detroit addressing next generation infrastructural issues within the EHL (Environmental Sustainability, Health, Livability) framework of the Sustainable Healthy Cities Research Network. The first stage of this collaboration was completed with presentations of six urban design projects at Columbia University in December 2015.

The studio comprised six Masters-level architectural students and eight Senior Undergraduate, Masters and PhD engineering students, who formed into interdisciplinary design teams of two to three students each. In October, the studio visited Detroit and met with its local partner; the Detroit Collaborative Design Center (DCDC), alongside students and faculty from the University of Michigan’s Urban Design Studio. The Columbia University cohort then returned to New York and began to dissect their on-site experiences and adapt the research ideas that they had initially developed. Over the course of the next few months, each of the six teams honed their topics and presented their work to a rotating internal and external jury through desk critiques, pin-up discussions, and formal reviews. Faculty from the engineering and architecture schools met together several times weekly with the students to facilitate discussion and support the maturing of their proposals.

Building off of Detroit Collaborative Design Center proposal for day lighting the Bloody Run Creek watershed, each interdisciplinary team of students explored strategies and catalysts for new growth in Detroit. Students adopted site-specific and program-driven designs, which were required to resonate at both a local and city-wide scale. An in-depth examination of growth was derived from a past-to-present study of the efficiencies and inefficiencies of the Detroit city-grid, as well as the existing regional fabric. A major challenge for each team was developing a mature and comprehensive proposal, which observed feasibility, scope and phasing in an implementable manner, together with cost-effectiveness and a host of other related challenges. The studio produced six final design proposals, which included proposals for localized stormwater management through soil-aeration and smart planting in vacant lots, a new Detroit-based flower industry in an abandoned auto-plant, a new technology campus of driverless cars and sustainably harvested energy, a new connected multi-modal transportation system for neighborhood development, an extension of existing public markets that focused on local food production and included energy generating bio-digesters for food waste, and an innovative strategy for cost-effective sustainable construction using blighted materials.

The studio’s architectural and engineering partnership generated both responsive and innovative design schemes, which have tremendous prospective value for the City of Detroit. As a whole, the studio has compiled a family of proposals that have the potential to serve as part of a strategic masterplan. In particular, the studio designs explore forms for new distributed infrastructure within the context of a city with diminishing traditional infrastructure needs; and the possibilities for new approaches to infrastructure to foster economic development and social cohesion.

The Urban Ecology Studio is co-taught each year by SRN faculty Patricia Culligan and Richard Plunz. In this studio they were joined by architect Kirk Finkel, landscape architect and Assistant Research Scientist Amy Motzny, and civil engineer and Earth Institute Post-Doctoral Research Scholar Robert Elliott. Professors Culligan and Plunz are currently leading efforts to explore the role of green infrastructure in urban stormwater management and community development in New York City’s Bronx River Sewershed. They decided to focus this year’s Studio on stormwater management and community development ideas for Detroit, in order to begin the integration of new ideas and strategies for distributed infrastructure systems across the SRN testbeds in New York City and Detroit.