Urban Technology at University of Michigan week 223
Musing on U-M's Campus Plan 2050
When the university moved to Ann Arbor in 1837 it was little more than a cluster of buildings and a field. There were cows! Approaching 200 years later, the campus spans millions of square feet over hundreds of acres and not a single cow in sight. This physical footprint is the subject of Campus Plan 2050, a master plan for the Ann Arbor campus that was released recently and aims to provide a "single blueprint for the future" that unifies all five campus nodes. We dig into thoughts on the plan and the opportunities it implies after the jump. But first, take a look at this view of the campus from around the time the University moved to Ann Arbor. Cows!
💬 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.
🧭 Campus Plan: How will it Feel?
Getting people excited about a theoretical urban plan is a hard thing to pull off. It's technical and dry and mostly conveyed from the vantage of 30,000 feet. Making a plan that’s both sensible at the level of the big picture and exciting for an individual viewer is no small feat. At the Alphabet subsidiary Sidewalk Labs, I was part of the small team in 2015-2016 that developed a city plan as a then-secret R&D exercise. That project has since leaked, so I'll describe it in light detail.
The work was called "Project Sidewalk," which makes it sound almost quaint, but don't let the name fool you. Our team of eventually ~30 people working directly on Project Sidewalk was surrounded by a network of consultants and domain experts many times larger. Collectively, zillions of human-hours of work were poured into figuring out the most promising ways to develop infrastructure, public spaces, and buildings that were conceptualized "from the internet up," as CEO Dan Doctoroff described it. If that tagline sounds familiar, it's because Sidewalk Labs adapted many of the Project Sidewalk ideas to their subsequent Sidewalk Toronto proposal.
The final documentation of Project Sidewalk included books and films not unlike Campus Plan 2050, and a good 20% of the material was dedicated to describing the quality of life benefits that we thought the plan could generate for future residents. Dan was incredibly focused on these points during the development of Project Sidewalk. I remember feeling squeamish about trying to describe and justify performance outcomes from imagined designs that had not been built yet, let alone tested. Still, if Sidewalk was going to be able to sell the idea of "a city from the internet up," it had to be able to also convey the value of doing so, so we worked through some fuzzy math to get there.
If I told you about Project Sidewalk's autonomous vehicle transportation systems, robust cycling networks, and extreme mixed-use zoning ideas you might feel that it all sounds nice and thoughtful. If you’re a student in my course, UT 430, you say that it sounds "very Copenhagen." While those are valid, they don't mean much to people who are not already steeped in urban planning. Instead of describing the technical details of proposals for urban systems, what if we focused instead on what it all adds up? For Project Sidewalk that was statements such as: "In Project Sidewalk you will have 25 hours in your day." That sounds awesome, right?! That's what all of the transportation and land use moves added up to—or so we reckoned.
We used a variety of storytelling methods to put the focus on how everyday people's lives would be improved in clear and relatable ways thanks to the innovations of Project Sidewalk so that a well-rounded proposal was communicated with an equally well-rounded explanation. That experience is one of the reasons that I'm insistent in our urban technology courses that we must continually draw an axis connecting systems to experiences. Good businesses and policies need to work in the big picture sense while also being understandable and desirable to individuals.
As I recently tucked into the documents for University of Michigan's Campus Plan 2050 it was exciting to see a focus on decarbonization, with a goal of achieving a net zero campus by 2040. What's less clear in these documents is how it's going to change campus life for students, faculty, staff, and community members. The plan does a lot of telling—there will be a monorail!—but struggles to explain what these planning moves add up to for the daily lives of faculty, students, staff, and visitors. The one area where experiential upgrades are clearest and most compelling is the plans for the athletic campus, perhaps due to the fact that the game day experience is so potent already.
As you can imagine, there's a fair amount of water cooler chatter at the College of Architecture and Planning with regard to the campus plan. I'll leave you to dive into the documents or skip the PDFs and go straight to the video that comes complete with Movie Trailer Voice™ narration. I couldn’t help but jump forward to the next steps: What will this place feel like? What new qualities of place will we be able to enjoy? How will the town & gown relationship evolve? And for all the plaudits the University deserves for climate mitigation and trying to curtail ill effects, where’s the strategy for adaptation? It’s a slow process, building a campus, so can we afford to make only one bet?
To explore some of these ideas I’m sharing three quick vignettes below that connect the high-level priorities of the plan to specific scenes and design moves. In doing this thought experiment I realize now that the experience working on Project Sidewalk was freeing in that we could present an urban plan primarily through the lens of user journeys, day-in-the life vignettes, and other means that were explicitly not spatial plans. This pulls attention to the adjectives, verbs, and adverbs—terms like easy, walking, or generously—instead of the nouns of dormitory, lecture hall, and street.
Hop in the time machine and let’s jump to 2050!
Unique Characters
With Campus Plan 2050’s intention to add density to the North Campus (where Urban Technology is housed, btw) the question was how generic blue rectangles on the plan were eventually turned into actual building designs. That leap from “put building here” to “what kind of building should be here?” created opportunities to enhance the character of each campus. Central Campus is still downtown, it’s still old, it’s still dense, it’s still charming. North Campus is now a garden of learning so dense that the buildings are lost amongst the vegetation. In due time, the tree canopy will grow to provide a large amount of shade for the North Campus.
From the air, North Campus looks like a broad river delta where ‘rivulets’ of vegetation and outdoor space weave through and between a mesh of buildings, forming a network of pocket parks and courtyards. In good weather ground floor walls slide open and the smell of fistulosa, phlox, and wild mint wafting in dissolve the boundary between inside and out.
Housing, commercial, and office spaces are woven into the fabric of the campus to help ensure that outdoor spaces are utilized year-round. Though summer is still quieter on campus, those who stay are treated to an intense show of fireflies who enjoy the microclimate of the green slivers that make the Campus so unique. Though North Campus feels much different than the Hogwarts of Central Campus, visitors are never confused about whether they’re at the University or not because some things never change. Even in 2050 the Block M logo is still everywhere.
Unusual Infrastructures
After first building BRT between the campuses and realizing that the headways were still not tight enough to fuse North and Central campus into one experience, U-M launched an unusual RFP for a monorail. It asked for the expediency and throughout of rail but required construction to have a net neutral carbon footprint. The winning team brought global engineering expertise and an invitation: we want to build this with you, not for you. U-M made a gutsy choice to eschew concrete and instead commit to an all-wood design for the tracks and support structure. At first this was ridiculed in the press as “the big roller coaster,” but over time the experimental nature of the project became endearing. Stations look different because they each test different tectonic and fabrication methods, translating directly into memorable identities for the stations. The unusual approach to this project solved a university need while spurring local construction companies to invest in decarbonized construction techniques, helping spread the sustainability impact beyond campus.
Public Performances
In 2035, just five years before the university achieved its goal of reaching a net zero carbon footprint, the lobbies of campus buildings were augmented with large custom dashboards that made building performance visual and public by broadcasting stats such as current energy sources and uses, occupancy rates, and a classroom air quality leaderboard. The College of Engineering’s board had a density that would challenge a sports betting lounge, each indicator calculated out to seven decimal places for amusement and precision. Taubman College’s is more talismanic, spending most of the day indicating the net result with a gradient of colors and revealing the details of this mercurial calculation only if you view in AR. The push to make data realtime and public turned the University’s decarbonization and improvement efforts into public commitments that were as verifiable as a datapoint recorded to the blockchain. It also created the opportunity for new rituals, like the “crossover” parties that units started hosting to celebrate the day at which on-site energy generation surpassed demand for the first time. New feedback loops, new individual behaviors, new collective outcomes, new rituals.
These weeks: user journeys but for employers; teaching; thinking about new courses; town hall with students (they want more reading and stronger studio culture, mostly); thinking about UMCI; meeting with visitors from Copenhagen (the city is inescapable!); debriefs of various kinds, not all of which were brief; and an election for the history books. There’s a whole lot of life happening out there right now, so take care of yourself. As it said on the programable clicky clacky sign in our studio space this week, “RIDERS KEEP RIDING.” 🏃