Harper Preserve: Agrivoltaic Research Park + Community Center

As renewable energy infrastructure rapidly expands worldwide, decarbonization has become a landscape challenge. Solar energy is inherently land-intensive. As a result, it is often competing with farmland, ecosystems, and rural identity for space. In the Midwest, land use competition can create tension with farmland preservation, rural character, and community acceptance as energy companies compete for land leases. This project reimagines Harper Preserve as a 4 MW multifunctional agrivoltaic solar system and living laboratory, exploring how solar infrastructure can support energy production while also sustaining farming, ecological health, research, and rural community resilience.

Harper Preserve is a 375-acre site owned by the University of Michigan's School for Environment and Sustainability, located in Argentine Township within Genesee County. It hosts agricultural fields, wetlands, forests, and Murray Lake, and represents well the broader composition and character of Lower Michigan's rural landscapes. Conversations with the preserve's caretaker revealed tensions between solar development and the local farming community. These tensions are heightened by the fact that many residents have seen little direct benefit from utility-scale solar and are frustrated by its intrusion into their home landscape.

Genesee County is also facing a generational transition. Nearly 80% of county land remains in agriculture; however, an aging population and declining interest in farming among younger generations are creating uncertainty around the future use of the land. This project investigates how renewable energy infrastructure can support, rather than replace, Midwestern agricultural landscapes by testing models of solar integration that provide supplemental income while maintaining productive cropland through agrivoltaics. At the same time, this proposal seeks to make renewable infrastructure visibly beneficial to the surrounding community through the introduction of a multiuse resiliency hub. With 12% of Argentine Township residents living in mobile homes, the Community Center is strategically located across from the neighboring mobile home community, creating a shared space for gathering, education, and on-site research exchange while providing critical shelter and emergency cooling resources for vulnerable community members during severe weather events.

Developed through collaboration between graduate students in Landscape Architecture and Environmental Policy and Planning, the project combines spatial design with implementation strategy, solar performance metrics, and community-centered planning. The proposal demonstrates how landscape architecture can guide more equitable and adaptive energy transitions by aligning renewable energy production with environmental stewardship, rural economies, and community resilience. As regions around the world confront similar tensions between decarbonization and land use, Harper Preserve offers a scalable model for integrating renewable infrastructure into working landscapes without displacing the communities and ecologies that define them.