Urban Technology at University of Michigan week 49
Drying out after floods in Detroit
Detroit received six inches of water in one evening last weekend, resulting in flooding across the city. Thousands of families and businesses have been mucking out their deluged homes, discarding contaminated items in huge piles of trash, and shifting their patterns of movement while waters lingered on highways and roads. In some neighborhoods cell service was spotty or absent on Saturday and the power was out for more than 24 hours. Many are just now getting back to normal after a week of effort on recovery. All of this is a sopping reminder that the work our graduates will undertake is of a different nature than traditional “tech.” Tiktok posts may flood your brain, but they’re unlikely to swamp your basement!
Hello! This is the newsletter of the Urban Technology program at University of Michigan, written by faculty director Bryan Boyer, to explore the ways in which technology is reshaping urban life. If you’re new here, try this 90 second video introduction to the program.
⛈ Rained Out
The last major flood of Detroit occurred in 2014 and some neighborhoods have struggled intermittently since then, so experiencing flooding of this magnitude again in less than 10 years highlights the extent to which stormwater management is an ongoing and significant challenge for the city.
Detroit Future City’s Strategic Framework, a pivotal report released in 2012, called for increased use of so-called “blue infrastructure,” which includes stormwater retention ponds and other uses of land-based approaches to handling stormwater so that the load on culverts and drainage systems is reduced. That kind of approach makes a lot of sense for Detroit, given the city’s relatively low density and large quantity of land under city control.
Here’s Detroit Water and Sewer Department Director Gary Brown in conversation with Eli Newman from WDET, the local NPR station, discussing a blue infrastructure retention pond that did not contain the waters:
Newman: I guess I’m just wondering, are there any lessons to be learned about where we are now?
Brown: Every opportunity that you have to separate stormwater from sewer, the combined system—we created an ordinance that requires businesses like Fiat Chrysler to manage the 100-year storm on site. We have to take every opportunity. Detroit is unique. We control a lot of the land, and we have the opportunity to be the greenest city in America. Every opportunity we can take to take water out of the system by dealing with it more naturally in a [blue/green] infrastructure way is the lesson that I take from that.
Newman: Is there any evidence to suggest that what happened at Fiat Chrysler with their retention pools? Is there any sense of their failure or anything there?
Brown: No, there was no failure. They just got overwhelmed. They were built for the 100-year storm, and we had the 500-year storm.
Infrastructure does not fail in polite and predictable ways. The Fiat Chrysler plant where a bunch of recently manufactured cars took an unplanned bath was designed to handle a big storm. It’s just that the storm that landed was even bigger than the one the plant (and the rest of the city’s storm infrastructure) was designed to handle.
The inherent difficulty of working in and on cities is why we are encouraging our students to explore via their early coursework to find something that they’re truly passionate about, be it climate and environmental justice, eliminating poverty, equitable food systems, stewardship of natural habitats, or anything else so long as it motivates them to keep trying, keep working, keep going—even when their basement is flooded.
Links
⛈ Forerunner provides tools to coordinate community level activity, assess flood risks for individual properties, and lower insurance costs through better data. h/t Robert Yuen, Taubman College Alum + Founder and CEO of Monograph
🎼 Interview with Cameron Tonkinwise on service design, and the need to bring sustainability directly into this work—a missions if we’ve ever heard of one.
🎙 Greg Lindsay chats with cofounder of REEF, Philippe Saint-Just (the company that operates the NBRHD kitchen we’ve looked at previously) about how they “separate the idea of a restaurant from the physical manifestation of that business,” in Saint-Just’s words.
🏠 Beautiful proposal by Framlab for anti-loneliness housing designed with “the geometry of conviviality.” We’re intrigued! How would you test such geometries?
This week: Quick presentation at Media Architecture Biennale, working on curriculum (always and forever), projecting teaching schedules, preparing to tweak the website. Bleaching basement floors. 🛶