Studio Shaffer Lutsko

Detroit embodies the struggles of many post-industrial American cities—shaped by the legacies of Fordism, widespread blight, and the erasure of the single-family home. The City and Its Double reframes these conditions not as decline, but as an opportunity to reclaim and reimagine the urban landscape through the recolonization of nature. By intensifying local ecologies and biodiversity, the project transforms the botanical garden typology into synthetic environments that foster new forms of micro-urbanism, dissolving boundaries between natural and artificial. Drawing on Artaud’s The Theater and Its Double, which locates power in the collision of reality and representation, the work positions Detroit as a city with its own double—its visible form intertwined with the hidden infrastructures and flows of people, capital, and nature that shape it.