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Time
Frame
The city of Dearborn
was first settled by Europeans around 1700 as a farming community. The area
was still agricultural when the Henry Ford Motor Company constructed the
Ford Rouge Factory along the Rouge
River in 1918. The
auto industry instigated a major population increase as people came to the
city in search of work. The residential fabric of the city developed in
direct response to the factory during the 1920s and again in the 1940s when
the factory was used for making weapons for World War II.
Around when the Rouge Factory was built in Dearborn, Henry Ford bought almost all of
the farm properties that occupied the center of the city. This property
stayed in the hands of the Ford Motor Company through the rest of the 20th
century, until Ford decided to begin its development as the Fairlane office
park in 1970. Since most of Dearborn
had developed decades earlier, the office park was a very different
typology of lower-density development through a large swath of the city.
Expansive
Area
Dearborn covers
about 24.5 square miles of land. Fairlane
is a 2360 acre development, or approximately 15% of Dearborn. The office park occupies the
entire central region of the city, stretching between the north and south
borders, and spreading 2 miles across.
Organization
Fairlane was one of the largest single office park developments in
southeastern Michigan.
Ford has developed and sold parcels of the property over the last 35 years,
but continue to structure its outward appearance through a code agreement
that determines the standards and boundaries of landscaping throughout the
Fairlane development.
Daniel
Ballnik is Ford's environmental control engineer, with an education in
environmental studies and geography, and has helped manage the landscapes
of Fairlane for the last 27 years. He is involved in wildlife habitat
mitigation, sustainable landscaping programs, and coordinating community
ecological restoration projects. The combination of Fairlane's expansive
area and centralized landscape management and design pose it as an
important part of Dearborn
and the larger metropolitan region's natural and urban systems.
The Urban and Natural Context
Examples from Fairlane
Reasons Behind the Fairlane Projects
Evaluations
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Dearborn houses
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