Areas that incorporate the bulk of Detroit’s industrial lands. They provide employment centers to accommodate a wide range of production and distribution activities, buffered from other uses with blue/green infrastructure.
A blanket like material you can purchase at a garden supply store as a way of covering up your newly broadcast seed and ensuring they stay in place long enough to sprout. Alternatively, you can use straw.
Lot designs suitable for installation by larger groups of volunteers.
Green infrastructure is when we use the land and plants in special ways to help the land absorb more water, instead of it flowing into pipes underground.
Using the land and plants in special ways, mostly to manage water. The US EPA defines green infrastructure as the use of vegetation, soils, and natural processes to manage water and create healthier urban environments. At the scale of a city or county, green infrastructure refers to the patchwork of natural areas that provides habitat, flood protection, cleaner air, and cleaner water.
Communities combine medium- and high-density, multi-family housing (both low- and high-rise) within a green, landscaped setting. This landscape context can include productive uses such as community gardens, or ecological uses such as forests or wetlands. These areas provide an opportunity to transform vacant land into an amenity for multi-family residents.
Commercial and retail establishments may be interspersed within the development area or at the periphery, along corridors.
Water that is gently used inside a building. For example, water from bathroom sinks, showers, and washing machines are greywater. Greywater may contain food, grease, or traces of household cleaning products. These nutrients can potentially serve as fertilizer for your plants. Healthy greywater systems require a change in behavior on the part of folks inside of a building, too. For example, certain cleaning products, like bleach, cannot be used in a typical greywater system, due to their chemical impact upon plants.
See Land
Plants that grow densely and low to the ground, like a carpet outdoors.
The shape or form of a plant; its silhouette. For example, “that maple tree sure has a broad habit!”
An ecological area used by a particular species; the natural environment where an animal or organism lives.
A Happy Lawn is a lot that has only grasses growing on it. The grasses may be short or tall. A Happy Lawn has a thick mane of hair, making it difficult to see the ground. Woody plants, such as small trees and shrubs, are not growing in scattered spots across the Happy Lawn. Happy Lawns are well-established and probably have been in place for several years. There is little to no shade on a Happy Lawn.
Districts that accommodate high-impact industrial activity isolated from residential and commercial uses. Heavy industrial zones are more permissive of high impacts such as noise, vibration, odor, traffic, and activity in order to provide for functional and secure space in the city required by such businesses as petrochemical tank farms, refineries, gasification plants, asphalt, and concrete plants.
Greater than twenty years
A landscape that will take time to mature and be of greater value to the next generation (e.g. your children or grandchildren)
A Hustling Lawn is a lawn on its way. The somewhat scruffy mix of plants mostly covers the ground—more than half of the lot is covered—but the plants don’t look or feel entirely like grasses.
The mix of species in a Hustling Lawn might not be limited to grasses—there can be other plants like wildflowers or weeds. Hustling Lawns are not as sparse as a Bald Lot but not as thick as a Happy Lawn. Depending on the mix of species growing in a Hustling Lawn, it is possible to guesstimate whether your soils are low on certain nutrients. A good test: if you were going on a picnic, you might need to double up your blanket in order to be comfortable on a freshly cut Hustling Lawn.