Empty Canyons of Skyscrapers: A Time-Lapse Visualization of Land Use Change

Myles D. Zhang, University of Michigan: College of Architecture / Urban Planning

This project visualizes the decline of ground-floor retail, upstairs office space, commercial and residential land uses in the city of Newark, NJ from 1900 to 1970. By synthesizing georeferenced Sanborn maps with city directory data, this project visualizes and measures the pace and progressive loss of businesses on a three-dimensional axonometric map of the downtown district. Decades of technological progress decentered the need for small businesses and craft industries to locate in and near downtown neighborhoods. The spread of automobiles, electricity, radio, and the technologies of mass communication empowered businesses to relocate from the downtown core to suburbs and rural areas. As a result, downtown neighborhoods lost many of the land uses and niche industries that once gave the space its sense of character and local identity. The predominant new land use to replace businesses that had left the city: Surface parking. Buildings were demolished to create surface parking lots. Surface parking (and supporting road infrastructure) is now the predominant land use in most American downtowns. This project follows the spatial and technological transformation of one downtown – as a case study and prism to understand the broader transformation of land uses and community spaces in the American downtown more broadly. Through a series of axonometric projections of the downtown district at decades-long intervals, this project visualizes the horizontal and vertical transformation of urban space. The result measures and makes visually legible the spatial process of urban decline.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 129. The City and Its Environments