Reclaiming Oblivion: Sacral Assemblies in Poletown, Detroit

Abstract

This thesis imagines the future post-industrial landscape of Detroit’s General Motors Assembly Plant as the medium through which the 1981 expropriation and destruction of the Poletown neighborhood are spatially registered. Proposed as a 2035 scenario, the project reclaims the 400-acre site as a public commons and memorial landscape through two overlapping programs: The Campau Cut, which reestablishes a former roadway as a mile-long connective pedestrian greenway, and The Sacral Circuit, a perimeter loop linking three landscapes recalled from oblivion —a grotto, a forested cemetery, and a plaza. Together, these interventions construct a collective landscape in which burial, labor, and congregation are held in relation. Rather than presenting a false reconciliation between nature, economy, and human loss, the proposal challenges frameworks of remediation and restoration applied to post-industrial sites by foregrounding landscape as a medium capable of holding absence without resolution, reclaiming ground where public use and remembrance remain in tension.