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Student: Moussa Aoun
Advisor: Scott Shall
Content Experts: Joongsub Kim, Edward Orlowski
The architectural and engineering goals pursued in most cities along river edges, such as
Detroit, during the 19th and 20th centuries, were justified for that time as they supported
the rapid growth of those cities. Such goals aimed to provide flood safety, separate sewage,
and support trade and transportation. However, the relationship shaped between the Detroit
River and the urban form around it during that time presented a conflict between two
systems: the natural and the built. Civic needs fueled by the industrial revolution and an
economy for growth were favored over the natural system and the ecological services that
it offered. Although not without merit, the design of these systems failed to incorporate the
dynamic and spatial qualities of rivers, and urbanization during that time was basically
“building on top of the environment” (Hajer et al. 2020). Such an approach created issues
like the increase of an impermeable footprint that in turn increases polluted runoff that
enters waterways, the complete loss of ecosystems and habitats due to extensive armoring
of the river edge, and the erasure of wetlands, which constituted the first nature of the
Detroit River prior to settlement. Nowadays, the vulnerability of those engineered systems
is starting to show as they reach a tipping point where they are failing in front of natural
forces due to climate change.
These climatological shifts have made it necessary to foster a more ecologically sensitive
and sustainable relationship with the Detroit River and to build resiliency along the edge
through a framework of social-ecological resilience, where treating nature as a stakeholder
and an ally is an inseparable part of thinking about cities, and where nature-based
solutions, where the power and intelligence of nature are taken as a starting point for
finding solutions. (Hajer et al. 2020) To test this claim, this thesis proposes to reimagine
the design of a mixed-use riverfront development present along the edge of the Detroit
River, through a framework of social-ecological resilience and urban form resilience, that
will be achieved by the tools of landscape ecology and spatial morphology.
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