After-City Baltimore: 2011 Urban Design Studio
The AFTER-CITY studio was a co-taught studio between Brent D. Ryan and El Hadi Jazairy at MIT. As one in a series of studios on shrinking cities, the studio addressed the question of what planners and designers can learn from the shrinking city phenomenon, and how transforming the urban condition in the area of Baltimore might reveal new urban paradigms. The studio proposed to address the phenomenon of the shrinking city, characterized by extremes of population loss, degradation of the physical fabric, and socioeconomic problems starting with a plastic conception of scale of the city to identify the nature (subjects of negotiation of the urban condition), the extend (continuities and discontinuities), and the dynamics (development profiles of growing or shrinking spaces) of the urban condition. The studio will address the urban through a non- conventional city-frame definition, starting by rethinking the concept of scale of the city.