Mind the Gap
Design by Claire Nelson (2011)
I've been dying to organize a design ideas competition in Detroit for a very long time. When the Detroit Design Festival put out their call for projects, I submitted a proposal and put together a simple website. Inspired by many, many other competitions for public spaces (including, most recently, the Institute for Urban Design's "By the City / For the City" project), I thought it would be interesting to solicit ideas for "in-between" spaces in our city -- alleys, surface parking lots, that sort of thing. The hope is to generate simple, creative solutions to address the "missing teeth" in our gap-toothed streetscapes and help stitch our urban fabric back together.
"Mind the Gap" seemed to be a good name, and this image of a chain-link fence represents all the underutilized surface parking lots around here that make me crazy.
More info about the project here.
