On Saturday, January 18, 2020, join the Harvard Alumni Architectural and Urban Society for a tour of the Center of Architecture’s new exhibition “Fringe Cities: Legacies of Renewal in the Small American City", led by curators Justin Brown and Morgan O’Hara of MASS Design Group. The exhibition explores the Fringe City, defined as an independently situated, small city that has been severely impacted by urban renewal.
From the Center of Architecture:
Between 1949 and 1974, the United States federal government invested billions of dollars in urban infrastructure through a series of planning, demolition, and construction programs that are collectively known as “urban renewal.” Originally packaged as anti-poverty initiatives, urban renewal often exacerbated existing problems, reinforcing segregation, building highways through downtown cores, and destroying historic structures. While many large cities have rebounded from these social and spatial traumas, smaller cities often continue to struggle with the same problems that urban renewal sought to resolve.
This exhibition presents a snapshot of MASS Design Group’s ongoing investigation into the Fringe City. It examines the role of design in mapping and selling strategies for renewal, taking a deep dive into four cities—Easton, PA; Saginaw, MI; Spartanburg, SC; and Poughkeepsie, NY—to understand local impact and hear from the organizations working today to address the legacies of this era of rapid, large- scale change.
The first floor of the exhibition provides context for defining the Fringe City. A timeline documents the social, economic, and political dimensions of urban transformations in America from 1920 to 2020. A selection of planning documents from this era of urban investment explores the role of designers in selling renewal, through enticing renderings, diagrams, and illustrations of possible futures, many of which would never be realized. Aerial images of 42 of the 100 identified Fringe Cities indicate the location and scope of Urban Renewal projects across small American cities.
On the lower level, the exhibition examines the four case study cities, providing unique accounts of the Fringe City experience. While Fringe Cities share common narratives of spatial transformation, the impact of these interventions varies across context, from a growing distrust of development in Easton to environmental injustice in Spartanburg and a condition of fractured density in Saginaw. As the site of one of MASS Design Group’s offices, and the city the firm is most familiar with, Poughkeepsie receives the deepest dive. A map of projects led by local agents of change to address the legacies of urban renewal is complemented by original photography of the city by Iwan Baan. While serving as cautionary tales, urging us to avoid repeating past mistakes, these case studies also shed a light on strategies for local, community-driven regeneration.
"What inspires me about this research is that in the landscapes of some of our forgotten places are seeds of inspiration and hope for how we might rethink our national infrastructure," says Michael Murphy, Founding Principal and Executive Director of MASS Design Group.
LOCATION
Saturday, January 18, 3:00 PM
AIANY Center For Architecture
536 LaGuardia Place
New York, NY
Justin Brown
Justin is a co-founder of MASS and a Design Principal focused on architectural work in the United States. He is dedicated to the growth of MASS’s Social Justice portfolio and applying MASS’s unique working method to projects in the US. He was the project architect for the Equal Justice Initiative’s Memorial to Peace and Justice and co-founder of the Hudson Valley Design Lab, which leverages community-based design to unlock upstream capital to build in disinvested cities. Justin was Principal-in-Charge of the Fringe Cities exhibition. Justin holds a B.Arch from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.Arch from Harvard University.
Morgan O’Hara
Morgan joined MASS in 2018 at the Hudson Valley Design Lab in Poughkeepsie, NY. With backgrounds in cultural research, public history, and collaborative design, Morgan has cultivated expertise in human-centered histories of urban spaces and infrastructural systems. At MASS, she has been leading research for exhibitions, publications, and built projects, working to further justice in the built environment through robust, historically- informed design. Morgan curated and led research for the Fringe Cities exhibition. Morgan holds a BA in Anthropology from Reed College and a MS in Historic Preservation from Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.