The green space of Detroit
By Benjamin HoustonSeptember 10th, 2009
Green space has long been a crucial component of any successful, livable city. Olmsted’s Central Park stands out as the most prominent example of sculpted urban bush country, but Portland, Oregon is also famed for its incorporation of parks and gardens into its civic architecture. My current hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan has a statutorily mandated greenbelt ringing the city. Green space is so valued by planners, in part, because it provides an escape, a place of respite for city dwellers looking to escape the heat, the frenzy, and the concrete.
Detroit is not so famed for its vast expanses of green, no manicured topography blankets a blissful corner of the city to which inhabitants flock on sunny days, laden with bikes and Frisbees, accompanied by dogs soon to be unleashed. However, just because Detroit lacks a planned park of the same model as those incorporated into Manhattan or Portland or Vancouver, does not mean that Detroit is wholly bereft of green and open space. Campus Martius was the keystone of the reconstruction of Detroit after the fire at the turn of the twentieth century, and Detroit is dotted with numerous pockets of planned aesthetic landscapes intermingled with the urban environment.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Lafayette Park was central to the effort to revitalize Detroit after the riots – and it continues to be illustrative of the fact that green space can be successfully integrated into that ongoing effort to reshape the asphalt morass of Detroit back into the city it once was and, more importantly, the city that it will become. It also continues to be a vibrant residential nexus for artists and writers and more.
The incorporation of open areas and landscaping was integral to van der Rohe’s philosophy as an architect and designer, and this is evidenced with exceptional clarity in Lafayette Park. A few years ago I worked with a landscape construction company in Detroit and had the opportunity to help a more experienced landscape designer overhaul the garden of one of the residents of the Park. The result was well-received and won a number of awards from landscaping associations in Michigan:
Roughly cut, landscape design can be divided into two categories of projects. There are those in which you reduce everything to ground level and build anew, and then there are projects that rehabilitate and rejuvenate what already exists. The former category is costly: do-overs require a lot of money and obliterate important historical markers. However, this particular Japanese garden was an example of the latter category of landscaping: older trees were maintained, existing piping and walkways were worked around, new beds reflected the placement of old plants.
This project was a somewhat humbling experience after a fashion, and emblematic of the unique character of landscaping in urban design and renewal. It also seemed to be a microcosm typifying an aesthetician’s view of Detroit’s problems. This particular garden had grown over and was unrecognizable when compared to the finished product above. The very landscape that had originally been allocated as dedicated green space, and carefully contemplated as part an urban renewal scheme had been left to go wild. And it was brought back in a matter of days.
By their very nature landscapes – whether they are of the gargantuan scale of Central Park, or the result of the more modest efforts of a solitary designer and crew – are more mutable than their steel, glass, and concrete counterparts. They change more quickly, become feral more quickly, but can be rescued with far less effort.
In the broader context of Detroit’s overarching economic, social, and political landscape there is a lot more at stake than southern exposures and crabgrass. The project that I was a part of was commissioned by one of the city’s wealthier residents, in one of its most illustrious and historically significant districts. Certainly not everyone in the city can even countenance hiring a private landscaping firm to bring their personal natural surroundings back from the brink. Feral houses are a rampant problem confronting the city (as previously blogged about) and silver bullet solutions obstinately remain obscured. However, Lafayette Park continues to illustrate the significance of planned green space in the success of cities and also the viability of a design philosophy that incorporates a lack of edifice as much as edifice itself.
Guest contributor and former landscape designer Ben Houston studies environmental law and policy at the University of Michigan. He is also an associate editor for the Michigan Journal of International Law.