Does bad zoning create interesting landscapes? What happens to the right landscape in the wrong location?

Before and During, September 2020. 

The short-lived tenure of this landscape as a location of industry is one moment in a lineage of accrual. Located at the confluence of an active scrapyard, a steel processing facility, and residential uses, wilderness here arises from the need to negotiate an extreme range of neighboring conditions. Situated roughly 250 feet from the Detroit border, this cul de sac of sorts experiences more isolation and more human exposure than other landscapes in this collection.

This landscape was created through a true layering of human intervention and confinement. Repeated dumping and layering up of new materials on site—cars, construction debris, tires, and more tires—introduced fluctuation and opportunity.

For almost forty years, this landscape paid tribute to its prior architectural tenant. A stand of cottonwood, elm, and catalpa amplified the footprint of the building previously on site.  The 35,000 SF woodland centered this lands’ use as a debris dumping ground and turn around point.

Trees previously defined the experience here: dense in the center and veiling the periphery. Although there were concerns about having a large, abandoned landscape in the neighborhood, this thicket-in-the-round was providing indirect services to surrounding residents. With the clearance of this landscape over the last year, following a change in ownership, many of its prior buffering qualities are gone.

At nearly five acres, this landscape once offered an immersive size and diversity of landscape experiences for habitat, wildlife, and children in the neighborhood alike. Given its size, this landscape was host to a range of introduced and persistent species. A constant low level dynamism defines this place. Over time it has been isolated, but never entirely. The future here will be something different.