The Inner Landscape of Detroit

The Inner Landscape of Detroit invites participants to explore a simple but powerful question: What if our memories could help shape the future of our neighborhoods?

This interactive workshop explores how memory and storytelling can become design tools. Through guided mapping exercises, participants will create a collective Emotional Atlas of Detroit and discover how lived experience can inform more inclusive, resilient, and human-centered neighborhood design.

The session begins with a short talk introducing the concept of emotional infrastructure: the invisible layer of memory, story, sensory experience, and everyday rituals that gives places meaning. Participants will discover how these often-overlooked qualities influence belonging, neighborhood identity, and community resilience.

Participants will then take part in a guided mapping workshop, reflecting on a Detroit neighborhood they know. Through a series of prompts, they will identify the places, sounds, landmarks, routines, and experiences that have shaped their connection to place, while considering what has changed and what should be protected as the city evolves.

Together, these reflections will form a collective Emotional Atlas of Detroit, transforming personal stories into shared design insight. The workshop demonstrates how lived experience can become valuable design data, offering designers, planners, architects, developers, students, and residents a practical framework for creating neighborhoods that foster belonging while preserving the unique character and identity that make Detroit unlike anywhere else.

UN SUSTAINABILITY GOALS

We use Detroit's UNESCO City of Design designation as a call to action for Detroiters to embrace the Sustainable Development Goals in their own communities, contributing to the active effort of solving global interconnected issues.