INTRODUCTION

CITY IN NEED OF CHANGE
Largest city in Michigan, USA, that is undergoing a transition as a whole. There has been a large depopulation since the mid seventies, which has resulted in a great deal of abandoned houses, farms and businesses.
Today Detroit is the 18th largest city in America with a population of 714 000 citizens, a large decrease from the near 2 million only 50 years ago.

Oversized city, a bad business. Detroit is vast even for the north american scale of things. Not only does this make the real estate market disruptive, it also toughens the chance of starting up small business and it increases maintenance costs. In 2010, the city faced a defi cit of as much as $124 million dollars. Costs to police property, put out fi res, light the streets, pump water and shovel snow for all these sparsely populated areas is ineffi cient. Large scale demolition to reduce the area of the city is needed.

Plans are to reduce the size of the city to save it from economically going down.
In 2010, 3000 vacated homes were demolished, and 7000 more the following three years. Up to 40 000 homes could eventually go.
At the same time as the reduction of Detroit is being realized, important neigborhoods' nodes should be identifi ed and developed as local initiators- and motors of progress and development. The local economy could be stimulated with more direct knowledge in crafting.

There is a plethora of different organizations and groups formed to revitalize certain parts of the city. One of the currently revitalizing neighborhoods is Corktown with places like Roosevelt Park and Michigan Central Station, and it is less than a 30 minute walk to downtown.
There are numerous events and festivals that take place in this historical site.
Michigan Central Station has historic and architectural signifi cance, but is today merely an abandoned symbol of the iconic building it was.

STATISTICS

A city with an abundance of housing but more than 18 000 homeless.
The updated, January 2009 statistics:
+18,000 homeless (shelter on any given night)
Detroit Rescue Mission Ministries is providing over
600 of them emergency, transitional and permanent housing.
30% of them are chronically homeless. 25% of them are children.
Over 15,000 people live on the streets each night in abandoned buildings or "doubled up" with family or friends.
Over 10,000 families in Wayne County will become homeless at least once during the next year.
Families now constitute 49% of the number of homeless persons per year.
The Detroit Free Press reports, that living on the streets puts more than half of them at risk for dying -- a far greater percentage than in any other American city.

SITE : MICHEGAN CENTRAL STATION

The chosen site location is concentrated mainly on the southern side of the old station, and the idea is to reclaim this land and reuse this space to reinstate the train-stop, open up the space by removing decaying structure and introduce a landscape of new functions and possibilities for programs within this station area, enhance the communication to Detroit and bring it closer to the center, clean out the ground floor waiting hall of the old station and revive it as an open plaza which will link and prolong the open Roosevelt Park with to the park/plaza design project.

Concentrating and reactivating already existing spaces within the city helps densifying and vitalizing this area the way it once was.
Michigan Central Station was an icon since it was built, and still is, but today mostly for its historical and architectural signifi cance. By creating this new center, in a central neighborhood of central Detroit, it further ignites the already on-going plans of "recycling" the city.
Detroit has a long history of steel production and with 30% of the city being dismantled there is an abundance of material to be re-used.