Taubman College Assistant Professor Maria Arquero and Assistant Professor Jen Maigret, in collaboration with Spatial and Numeric Data Librarian Nicole Scholtz, were awarded funding through UM’s Graham Environmental Sustainability Institute and Data Driven Detroit for their proposal “Liquid Planning Detroit.” The proposal prioritizes a watershed biased research trajectory that tackles challenges in water quality throughout the Detroit metropolitan area. Through the development of a stormwater geodatabase and a visually interactive best management practice manual, this research proposes to empower the researchers and citizens of Detroit to productively contribute to the cleaning of our waterways through design practices.
The grant is intended to fund personnel and site documentation research over a two year project cycle culminating in an open source platform hosted by Data Driven Detroit, datadrivendetroit.org, enabling users to create comparative and speculative maps that visualize the connectivity between the scale of individual parcels, neighborhoods, and the watersheds encompassing Detroit. In so doing, Liquid Planning Detroit positions relevant GIS analyses at the forefront of the development of an interactive Best Watershed Practice Index wherein data drives design in Detroit.
Liquid Planning Detroit grows from research funded through a 2010 Research Through Making Grant made possible by the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. The seed project, Water+sheds, considered relationships between construction practices and water quality throughout the Great Lakes Basin. Water+sheds was exhibited in the form of an atlas at the Taubman College Architecture Gallery in January 2011. The work has since been presented at the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture 2011 Conference in Montreal, Canada and was recently selected for publication in the forthcoming Third Coast Atlas, co-edited by Clare Lyster, Charles Waldheim and Mason White.
