Daylighting Seen as Restoration Tool

Detroit officials are looking into ?EUR??,,????'?????<

 

In urban design terms, daylighting is the redirection of a stream into an above-ground channel.

For decades, some Detroiters have dreamed of restoring part of the natural landscape that the French found in 1701 by opening up, or daylighting, streams that were buried more than a hundred years ago as sewers in the rapidly expanding city.

With parts of Detroit now virtually abandoned, hopes of daylighting one or more of Detroit’s historic streams have a shot at becoming reality.

The Kresge Foundation recently donated $450,000 to the University of Detroit Mercy’s Detroit Collaborative Design Center to map plans for the daylighting of Bloody Run Creek, the east-side stream where Chief Pontiac’s braves defeated the British in 1763.

St. Louis-based developer Richard Baron, a Detroit native, is working with U-D Mercy designers to plan an ambitious 3,000-acre green environment centered on a daylighted Bloody Run. The plan remains far from implementation, but would include urban farms and alternative-energy fields.

Shaun Nethercott, founder and executive director of the environmentally minded Matrix Theatre in Detroit, said last week that daylighting Bloody Run would be one way for Detroit to reestablish a healthy connection with the natural world.

“Being in a green environment reduces anxiety, builds a sense of place, reduces all kinds of symptoms,” she said. “We need to be connected to a whole life-giving environment, and this is a real way to do it.”

Bloody Run Creek in Detroit’s Elmwood Cemetery is considered a good candidate for restoration.

The tiny creek that trickles through a portion of Elmwood Cemetery on Detroit’s east side is a remnant of a once-lush system of streams that watered the entire Detroit landscape in colonial days. Those streams were long ago buried as part of the growing city’s sewer system.

Environmentalists are enthusiastic about the possibility of opening up Bloody Run.

“It creates a cooling effect, literally a living air conditioner for the city, and makes a softer, greener, cooler landscape,” said Shaun Nethercott, an environmentalist and founder of the green-minded Matrix Theatre in Detroit.

Despite the challenges, daylighting is growing increasingly popular in urban centers around the world. Major daylighting projects have been carried out in London; Seoul, South Korea, and Zurich, Switzerland.

Based on demand, the Bloody Run watershed, which covered about 3,000 acres in colonial times, could become a center for recreation, wind and solar-panel farms and urban agriculture, as well as more traditional economic development, Vogel said.