Taubman College’s Lars Gräbner is featured in a new BridgeDetroit news report that investigates “ghost streams” — waterways that were filled in or covered up during city development and are now a contributing factor to urban flooding.

Gräbner, associate professor of practice in architecture and principal at VolumeOne Design Studio in Detroit, discusses his study to remap Detroit and uncover ghost streams. Gräbner began the mapping study in 2010; the results were included in the book Mapping Detroit: Land, Community, and Shaping a City (Wayne State University Press, March 2015). 

“The idea was to create a self-sustaining hydrological system, use that as a new way of organizing the city,” Gräbner says in the BridgeDetroit report. He acknowledges that implementing such a plan is going to take a lot of initiative, political will, and education of the public. “This is not an impossible vision. It is actually very practical and will turn the city around to be a much better city.” 

This news report is part of “The Checkup: Water and Human Health in a Changing Climate,” a project of the Great Lakes News Collaborative. The report premiered Nov. 25 on Detroit PBS stations.