Brightmoor Runway

Transforming a section of a broken sidewalk into an illuminated running, play, and exercise track.

Brightmoor Runway

University of Michigan, Stamps School of Art and Design Detroit, MI

To transform a section of a broken sidewalk in Detroit's Brightmoor community into an illuminated running, play, and exercise track. The track will have a custom-designed rubber surface with motion activated solar lights and a speed display to stimulate kids and adults to test their personal speed limits and run this section of the sidewalk as fast as they want.

We will work with local contractors to create and install the track based on plans developed in a series of open workshops and meetings with our community partners, ranging from k-12 students and their teachers, to local block clubs, community centers and churches. Brightmoor Runway will embrace the connection of physical activity and physical computing by designing and building the solar activated light speed display in an adjacent community local maker space and holding a regular series of opportunities to engage the project at all levels and all abilities.

Brightmoor Runway re-purposes a portion of sidewalk where scores of schoolchildren board their school buses each day. Providing a permeable surface for good fitness and good drainage, the track brings a joyous, buoyant, well lit and well traveled surface to a residential street on which there are more vacancies than occupants.

  Streets And Sidewalks


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