Another two weeks and we’re still walking to learn. Recently we were in Detroit for the second field trip of the 2025 Spring Cities Intensive. On previous trips to Detroit (one, two) we’ve focused on the public realm, but this year we switched it up a little and the group had their eyes trained on questions of land use. Want to see what we found?

💬 Hello! This is the newsletter of the Urban Technology program at University of Michigan, in which we explore the ways that data, connectivity, computation, and automation can be harnessed to nurture and improve urban life. If you’re new here, try this short video of current students describing urban technology in their own words or this 90 second explainer video.

🌳 Transecting

To study land use in Detroit we hop on and off the bus for walks and brief lectures while making our way through the dusty hinterlands, to suburbia, and eventually to downtown. This is the same approach we’ve taken to explaining the concept of the “transect” since our first year and what works well is that you can talk about the enduring fundamentals while demographics, economy, and culture shift with geography. Land use, density, relationships between the street and buildings, materials, nature, parking & cars form the variables that morph and change in relationship to each other as we travel.

First stop: Northville, MI! This is just about as quintessential small town USA as you can get. It’s approaching two hundred years old with a center that has what community development director Justin Quagliata described as “old timey charm” and also possesses its own fair share of surface parking lots. This belies the historical development of Northville, which is again quite typical, and is a place that prides itself on walkability and hosting events like outdoor markets and a popular Halloween celebration, but is compelled to serve a broader region that is car-dependent. Our morning in Northville kicked off with a discussion inside the city hall, which is very important. I’m glad that we can now say that 100% of our students have visited a small town city hall because this is a symbolic and literal place of work that has a huge influence upon land use.

Justin then leads us on a walking tour where much of the discussion is about ‘placemaking,’ which is a term of art that exists more in the minds of practicing planners and urban designers that it does the academy. He describes how “everyone wants to put something on our lampposts,” which speaks to the value that people see in the urban realm and the work that the city streets are expected to do culturally for this community. The term placemaking can be a little demeaning if not used carefully—the town is a place even if it doesn’t have signage on its lamp posts, after all—but I like this term because it captures the breadth of urban experiences without minding the professional silos that are responsible. A place has evident character, it’s got a way of doing things, it has boundaries or edges that you can feel. It might even have a smell, like the way dropping into Northville’s Ford Field park is a mix of grass and petrichor on this particularly drizzly morning.

Jump cut to Midtown Detroit for pizza (square kind, obviously) and then another zap to Virginia Park, a neighborhood in Detroit. Lisa Johanon of the non-profit Central Detroit Christian Community Development hosted us and spoke about how, during her 30 years of work in that part of the city, she has seen downtown and midtown flourish but the neighborhoods are “still the same.” Just look at the number of empty lots where houses have long sense decayed, collapsed, or been demolished.

Virginia Park is hard to understand when you first visit, because it’s like looking at the transect with your eyes crossed, with the image splitting into three fuzzy and competing versions of itself: Much of Virginia Park was built as an “urban core” level of density and nowadays looks more like low density “general urban” when you check the satellite imagery, but has shops and services at a level that more closely matches the “sub-urban.” Until Central Detroit Christian started a farm and produce market the only local options for food were party stores (what Detroit calls liquor stores). Johanon describes in meticulous detail and with determination the work CDC does to redevelop properties “from vacant to vibrant,” and it’s inspiring.

After another zip-zap on the bus we’re in New Center, former center of the automotive world when GM was headquartered in the Fisher Building, and walking to Piety Hill. Along the way, building heights went from 30 stories down to mostly 2-3, illustrating that the transect is not a linear thing in a polycentric city like Detroit.

This zip-zap rhythm is how the two days in and around Detroit proceeded: Go here, learn and look, draw and photograph. Try to make sense of the street section (a drawing of the relationship between buildings and the street) so that we can connect that to larger questions of urban form and what it all means for urban life. Students took those same ideas to downtown, the People Mover, the Renaissance Center, Eastern Market, and Lafayette Park. Throughout all of these geographies, the transect serves our students more like a compass than a map—a tool for looking past the surface of what you see to develop a foothold of orientation and perspective in unfamiliar places.

These weeks: Two trips down, one to go. Packing bags for Chicago. Side trip (for faculty) to NYC to learn from Related, New Lab, and SHoP Architects about their work in urban technology. Boston for the AIA conference. Pollen also in the air. 🏃