Joe Louis Greenway As A Strategy For Community Empowerment: Multidisciplinary Methods For Ensuring Positive Impacts

Abstract

Cities like Detroit are increasingly turning to green infrastructure improvements such as greenways to provide multifunctional benefits including connectivity, improved social and environmental health, and community empowerment and healing. How does an infrastructure project accomplish environmental justice goals and how can we ensure that the local communities are receiving the benefits? Through our research project, we examine how the Joe Louis Greenway will impact Detroiters and what strategies can be used to promote positive social and environmental outcomes. To answer these questions, we took a multidisciplinary research approach. This included a literature review to understand the challenges and opportunities greenways offer communities and to identify key elements of equitable green development including what should be measured to ensure local benefits. Evaluating local news provided a non-intrusive understanding of the public perception of the Greenway, which is an important indicator of its long-term viability. We also conducted an analysis of the impact of design by examining existing and notable urban greenway projects from different cities and scales through the lens of landscape architecture, urban planning, and design. Our final piece is an extension of the City of Detroit’s Housing & Jobs Toolkits from the Joe Louis Greenway Framework Plan (Vol. 1), which explores a range of tools that can be implemented alongside the construction of the Joe Louis Greenway in order to achieve goals of wealth creation and affordable housing. We built on this to create a similar toolkit that looks at social and environmental aspects of the Greenway with recommendations for land use, design, and program strategies. We included suggested ways to measure progress toward social and environmental outcomes. Finally, we provided guiding questions based on the lessons learned from our research to help evaluate how the Joe Louis Greenway is meeting its goals.