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Urban Design in an Expanded Field: Baltimore's Watershed 263
This studio explored an urban ecosystem design process as a cross-disciplinary collaboration between architects, scientists and neighborhood organizations. The students worked with ecologists, sociologists, non profits, and policy makers on the redesign of eleven neighborhoods in West Baltimore, an inner city area with three thousand vacant lots, underutilized infrastructure, and acres of abandoned industrial land. Neighborhoods - encompassing new housing, work, recreation and leisure places, as wells as educational, health, day care and senior care facilities - were redefined around landscapes for retaining and treating rainwater as part of a regional effort to revive the Chesapeake Bay.
The thirty-two urban design students eventually formed seven groups allied around difference scales of possible intervention into the neighborhood. The projects work in scale from individual points of personal intervention in back yards or roofs, to large-scale changes in the role of infrastructure in the life of the city. The ecological theory, metaphor and model of patch dynamics was employed to see cities as a mosaic of shifting relation between biophysical and social flows and activities. Patches can work at any scale, and the design of urban patches aim towards resilience, flexibility and social equity in ultimately shifting power structures in the city.
Attiq Ahmed, Chi-Yu Chou, Karl Hamilton, Pei-lun Lin
Justin Moore, Hsiang-I Chen, Manolo Figuero, Han Tian, Oliver Valle
Joseph Plouffe, Jenny Jie Zhou, Derek Mizner, Kim de Freitas, Chin-Hua Huang
F. Gurpreet Shah, Amit Talwar, Emilia Ferri, Peter Robinson, Poku Chen
Li-Chun Kuo, Esi-Kilanga Bowser, Scott Elder, Chen-Mai Soong, Ward Verbakel
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