Houses as Infrastructure

Houses as Infrastructure is a speculative urban design project that explores new public space and green infrastructure opportunities using vacant land in Detroit

Travis Crabtree’s Master of Urban Design program was based in Detroit. The program focused on rethinking the post industrial city’s abandoned landscape, blighted houses, and building inventory.
Crabtree’s studio project showcased how the land and structures could be retrofitted using green stormwater infrastructure to collect, store, and use for urban gardening purposes. The project demonstrates multiple scales of interventions from the single parcel rain garden, to the multiple parcel retention pond, to the largest intervention, a collection of 30 vacant parcels demonstrating how the infrastructure can become a public space.
Detroit houses are built with concrete foundation basements, the project uses the foundation as a cistern. The design showcases the roof pitch becoming inverted to direct stormwater into the cistern.
2015
1 Square Mile
Detroit, Michigan