Changing views: Exploring pathways in the Motor City

Abstract

Pathways have informed movement and experience for a hundred years. Those pathways implied how we live, travel and the establishment of place. New modes of transportation shifted how people move, creating the need for organization of paths. Today, city planners are accommodating for new and growing needs of human movement. My thesis looks at the City of Detroit through the lens of pathways established and how to reestablish new paths. The City of Detroit is best known for its growth during the time of the invention and advancement of the automobile. Existing factories allowed for swift transition to car manufacturing that would go on to shift the urban development of the city. Today, Detroit is filled with highways, five lane wide roads, and factories that populate every neighborhood leaving disjointed residential and commercial parcels with voids of nothing between them. Pockets of livelihood exist in the commercial districts but left behind voids to be someone else’s problem, its inhabitants. My thesis makes use of a new proposed greenway throughout the city of Detroit to establish an alternative pathway and leverage the greenways exposure through architectural intervention to fill in holes of the Poletown.