Domesticating sprawl : Dearborn Michigan and the Green Moat

Over the last century of urban decentralization, the suburb migrated a critical distance beyond the traditional city, and transformed into sprawl. The homogenous landscape of sprawl is characterized by repeating horizontal imagery of featureless buildings foregrounded with grass berms, planned for experience through the mediating frame of the car's windshield. Contemporary design discourse has interrogated sprawl from many angles in search for ways to intervene in the most popular and most impenetrable form of American urbanism, issuing discussions ranging from those that raise polar alternatives to those that accept sprawl and meticulously analyze its forms and structure. However, this thesis asserts that the American Midwest is a unique and important territory that has not been adequately appraised in the sprawl debate. Not only does the underlying structure and ideology of Midwesternr landscape evoke certain comparisons to sprawl, one might argue that the American suburb was first borne out of the Midwest, more specifically around the Motor City Detroit. If the automobile is the enabling apparatus of sprawl, the birthplace of the automobile then coincides with the birthplace of the suburb. As both the originating source of suburban development and a current scene of booming sprawl, the metropolitan region of Detroit sees the confluence of the new and the old forms of decentralized urbanism and is accordingly an excellent proving ground for new insights and proposals.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Law, Marie (Marie Lynne)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Ann Pendleton-Jullian.

• Architecture.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/34426

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/34426