| This landscape master plan celebrates the potential to bring natural and industrial systems together to create a productive, regenerative landscape. Henry Ford’s vision of linear production fundamentally reshaped the American manufacturing system --and provided a compelling framework for the transformation of this historic industrial site. Embracing Ford's heritage of innovation and business strength, the plan draws its inspiration from the features of the site and gives shape to the themes of linear production, historical legacy, and environmental regeneration. The large-scale interplay between the industrial and natural systems creates a new model for the regeneration of air, water, soil, and habitat through natural processes.
Devised for implementation over two decades, the design enables an orderly flow of people and delivery of materials through the site. A rectilinear pattern of hedgerows, swales, and trees reinforces the pre-existing street grid and creates a system that filters the millions of gallons of stormwater and reestablishes wildlife habitat.
The plan also reshapes Miller Road, the thoroughfare along the Rouge's eastern edge, as a tree-lined public boulevard highlighting the site's industrial heritage.
Additionally, the complex hosts groundbreaking research in phytoremediation. Researchers identified a dozen plants that successfully absorb and neutralize polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons from the soil and established a 1.6-acre demonstration garden and research lab near the old coke oven by-products operations.
By rebuilding the processes of the site, the plan recreates the 20th century’s preeminent model of vertically integrated industry as a replicable model of sustainable manufacturing and a positive legacy for the future.
|
