What happens when a landscape in Detroit is left to its own devices?

This 16-acre landscape resides along a major Detroit thoroughfare. Hints of its messy interior once lined the corridor. Redeveloped as housing for an adjacent manufacturing facility during WWII, the neighborhood turned trailer park was shuttered in the early 1980s. Despite its prominence and visibility, the site avoided major acts of disturbance for more than 30 years.

With an aging but visible street grid in place, evidence of is prior use as a neighborhood remained—light poles, parking signs, water connections. Concrete pads that previously served as landing spots for trailers remained in place across the landscape. Most striking was the mix of species, an even mix of mature pioneering and ruderal species, alongside many persistent reminders of the prior domestic use of this space. The botanical logic of a neighborhood remained amidst the logic of a progressively emerging urban woodland.

The defining attributes of this landscape were its robust mix of species. The remnants of prior domestic use intermingled with mature and self-introduced species. A handful of mature elm that survived Detroit’s Dutch Elm Disease remained on site until 2019, and provide the strongest sense of character and enclosure.

Although a strong sense of contrast exists between the interior experience of this landscape and its surroundings, ongoing evidence of liminal human interaction peppered the site. Piles of construction debris, deeply worn paths for off-road vehicle access, snowmobiles, and even the occasional marijuana growing operation appeared within this setting. Surrounded to the south and the west by other abandoned and large footprint properties, a sense of deep isolation was conjured. This was a creepy landscape. Although it no longer exists in this form, it was the embodiment of what the national media (somewhat falsely and antagonistically) portrayed about Detroit in the 1990s and 2000s—a vacated and creepy former human settlement. Part of my personal surprise was to actually locate this experience within the city.

It is unlikely that a neighborhood will ever be ‘closed off’ in Detroit, however, this landscape provided collateral evidence of what might occur botanically. Uniquely, though, this is a landscape created in Detroit without a catalytic deposit of subsurface minerals. The landscape was sealed off from through-traffic in the true sense of an island. The act of mineral depositing that commonly precedes the creation of new vacant land in Detroit was in no way a part of making this landscape.

This property changed hands in the spring of 2019. Shortly thereafter the site was cleared. A year later, the land sits comparatively naked, with robust ruderal activity on site, but no trees or woody growth. Despite the costs associated with remediation and addressing the presumed extent of contamination on site, redevelopment in the near term is possible. At the time of this writing, this is a new landscape, slightly more than a year old. Despite its deeply island-like quality, this was a mutable landscape. At every step it has embraced change.