research
Research on the City 2012: Detroit In its inaugural year, the Research on the City initiative is a competitive faculty research grant. The terms of the initiative encourage research teams to look beyond Taubman College to include collaborators from other fields of study. In addition, teams were required to focus their work on the city of Detroit.
to, the city’s complex amalgam of contradictions. This project returns to an idea posed in 1969 by Detroit geographer, William Bunge, who proposed an “Atlas of Love and Hate” representing the city’s unknown, repressed, and invisible spatial conditions.
The grant submissions were anonymously evaluated by a distinguished jury: Malik Goodwin, B.S.’97, M.Arch./M.U.P.’02, Vice President - Project Management, Detroit Economic Growth Corporation, and Taubman College Alumni Society Board of Governors member; Maria Nicanor, Associate Curator of Architecture, Guggenheim Museum, co-curator, BMW Guggenheim Lab; Andrew Zago, Principal, Zago Architecture.
Rania Ghosn, El Hadi Jazairy, Sangyun Lee, School of Natural Resources and Environment: “Geographies of Trash” projects
Grants to fund a yearlong study were awarded to five research teams, and the results of their work were exhibited at the Liberty Research Annex gallery November 16–December 16, 2012. The grant program and exhibition were generously supported by Cynthia Berkshire, A.B.’83 LSA, and Alan Berkshire, B.S.’82.
Mireille Roddier, Anya Sirota, Lada Adamic, School of Information & Center for the Study of Complex Systems, Jean Louis Farges, AKOAKI: “Imaging Detroit” is a speculative
María Arquero de Alarcón, Jennifer Maigret, R. Charles Dershimer, School of Education: “A Dozen Playgrounds”
proposes to recuperate playgrounds as space for children, central to the living fabric of the city. Four schools were identified as sites for prototypical playgrounds; the iterative designs for these sites examine three different approaches toward designing interfaces between landscape and urbanism, overlaid with a concern for the natural environment.
five situated yet generic architectural strategies of trash formations in the territorial grid. The five projects — CAP, COLLECT, CONTAIN, PRESERVE, and FORM — materialize alternative imaginaries of trash systems to engage issues of monumentalism, value, scales of management, social relations, ecology, and geography.
design research project and situational encounter that spanned a number of concentrated months, but found public and material expression over the course of a two-day pop-up agora and open-air media festival in a park on Detroit’s near east side.
Andrew Herscher, Steven Mankouche, Andrew Thompson, School of Art & Design: “Atlas of Love and Hate: Detroit
Heidi Beebe, Julia McMorrough, John Marshall: The “Re:ToolKit for Detroit” project began with the question, “What can get made in Detroit?” The objective of the research was to gather insights about the skills and services available in the city today by conducting interviews with people who make things, resulting in a handbook for good communication practices between designers and fabricators. It continues with an online version at www.retoolkitdetroit.org.
Geographies” undertakes an alternative atlas of Detroit: a geography of the city that emerges from, and is adequate
For more information: taubmancollege.umich.edu/rotc
14 portico | vol. 12-13, no. 1