05-06-11
BioCellar Event Videos
If you missed the BioCellar event at the CUDC on April 26th, now you can watch the presentations online:
BioCellar Presentations - 1 of 3 - Intro
BioCellar Presentations - 2 of 3 - Darrell Frey | Bioshelter Market Garden @ Three Sisters Farm
BioCellar Presentations - 3 of 3 - Gauri Torgalkar | BioCellar: Concept to Prototype
04-07-11
BioCellar Event 4/26 @ CUDC
Click here to download BioCellar invite pdf
06-15-09
The Bridge Project Charrette
For more info on the Bridge Project event, please visit: www.clevelandbridgeproject.com
Every year, graduate students at the CUDC take part in a community design charrette, which addresses the urban design needs of a particular site or neighborhood in Northeast Ohio. This year’s charrette will be part of the Bridge Project scheduled for September 25th and 26th.
During a typical charrette, students are asked to gather relevant data about the focus area in preparation for a community meeting where stakeholders and residents share their thoughts and desires for the neighborhood. The students then work along side CUDC staff to quickly develop design solutions and assemble presentations for the community. In years past, the student charrettes have focused on downtown Lakewood, the Jewish Community Federation site, the Howard Street corridor in Akron and Youngstown’s Oak Hill neighborhood.
06-14-09
Public Workshops for Re-Imagining a More Sustainable Cleveland
Do you have vacant lots on your street that you and your neighbors would like to improve?
Need some ideas about what to do with them?
Need a grant to pay for supplies?
You know firsthand the negative effects of unkempt vacant lots in your neighborhoods. Cleveland currently has 3,300 acres of vacant land and our inventory is growing with every new demolition. Now we will have resources to address them.
Please join us to learn more about the “Re-Imagining a More Sustainable Cleveland” grant program. We will be holding public workshops in locations of our vacant land reutilization projects for you to learn about the resources available to revitalize city land bank lots in special target areas.
These sessions will provide information on:
• Overview of the Re-Imagining a More Sustainable Cleveland plan
• Ideas on what you can do with vacant lots
• How to use the Re-Imagining Cleveland Vacant Land Re-Use Pattern Book and Ohio Green Print website
• Application for Re-Imagining Cleveland grants
05-21-09
Map of Cleveland’s Green Systems
This is a map of Cleveland showing vacant sites (in red), existing parks (in dark green), and proposed parkland and greenspaces (in light green). The map was drawn by the Urban Design Center for Cleveland LandLab.
posted by marianne eppig.
05-20-09
Pop Up City Book Trailer
It might not have the quick edits and intense action sequences of typical movie trailers, but we think our star moved pretty fast, for a panda.
Urban-Infill Volume 2: Pop Up City can be ordered from Amazon or from the Shrinking Cities Institute website.
Support for the Pop Up City initiative is provided by the Civic Innovation Lab and the Sears-Swetland Foundation. The publication of the Pop Up City book was made possible by funding from the George Gund Foundation and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
by david jurca
05-08-09
CircletheUSA.com visits Cleveland
CircletheUSA.com, a website maintained by the Planning Commissioners Journal, is currently undertaking a cross-country road trip documenting notable city planning projects along the way. The recently concluded first leg of the trip stretched from Vermont to Cleveland and the second leg will continue on to Chicago. 
While in Cleveland, the blog’s author met with Terry Schwarz, Senior Planner from the CUDC, Bob Brown, Planning Director for the City of Cleveland and Bobbi Reichtell, Senior Vice President for Programs at Neighborhood Progress Inc., to discuss the Re-Imagining a More Sustainable Cleveland report. The visit and subsequent thoughts on Cleveland’s progressive strategy for addressing vacancy are presented in the Audacious…or Realistic? post.
04-24-09
Artists vs. Blight
Art installation at Bridge Mix, photo by Stephen Piscura
The CUDC’s Pop Up City initiative, Arts Collinwood and other Cleveland arts organizations were highlighted in a recent Wall Street Journal article about artist communities developing in blighted neighborhoods. Although there’s nothing new about artists moving into low-rent areas, the recent foreclosure crisis is motivating communities to increase incentives for artists:
Drawn by available spaces and cheap rents, artists are filling in some of the neighborhoods being emptied by foreclosures. City officials and community groups seeking ways to stop the rash of vacancies are offering them incentives to move in, from low rents and mortgages to creative control over renovation projects.
Some of the local organizations mentioned in the article include:
Arts Collinwood :: Collinwood
78th St. Studios :: Detroit Shoreway
ArtMart 09 :: Ohio City
DanceWorks @ CPT :: Detroit Shoreway
Also check out this set of Collinwood photos from the Plain Dealer.
by david jurca
04-23-09
Shrinking Flint
Cleveland hacked-house rendering by Gauri Torgalkar, CUDC
The New York Times recently posted an article on how Flint, Michigan is planning to deal with its city’s depopulation and vacancy by demolishing entire neighborhoods. The idea is that speeding up the process of decline in certain sections of the city will consolidate any housing demand that remains into a few viable areas.
Housing demolition as a reaction to vacancy is occurring in Cleveland as well. The City is currently planning to remove 2,000 homes this year. Not only will most of the embodied energy of these structures be lost in a landfill, but the fabric of the neighborhoods will also be forever changed. Can the abandoned structures still be used as urban greenhouses or biocellars? What sort of neighborhoods are we creating if we add 2,000 new voids a year? Could these new acres of land be put to productive use?
by david jurca
04-18-09
Green City Blue Lake on Pop Up City
Last week Marc Lefkowitz, blog author extraordinaire for Green City Blue Lake, published a great post about Pop Up City and the Urban Design Center’s efforts to ignite (not literally) vacant spaces in Cleveland.
To read the post, visit http://www.gcbl.org/blog/marc-lefkowitz/counterculture-ignites-fallow-urban-space
In addition to giving our new publication, Pop Up City, a congenial review (”The essay and book is not only a fascinating read, it’s filled with eye candy”), Marc brought up some good points. He asked towards the end of the post:
“Will those seeds grow to inspire some Temporary Users to leave the protective circle of the CUDC?“
In other words, he’s asking whether the Cleveland Urban Design Center’s Pop Up temporary events will inspire other groups and individuals around the city to start temporary uses of their own in otherwise abandoned lots.
For anyone out there who is reading this, we would love to hear back from you. Leave a comment and let us know about your experiences, ideas, and events that were/are all about temporary uses of vacant spaces.
And for anyone who is interested in starting a temporary event or use of a vacant space in Cleveland, there is a handy brochure in the back of the recent Pop Up City publication titled “Temporary Use Advice & Contacts”. It lets you know what kinds of permits you might need to get in order to use a space, and it’s also chock-full of advice from how to get sponsors to how many Port-O-Potties you may need. So, if you haven’t already, pick up a book and start igniting (please, not literally) Cleveland!
by marianne eppig.
01-21-09
A Taste of the Upcoming Pop Up City Publication
This is a taste of Jennifer Malloy’s article “What is Left of Planning?! Residual Planning!” that will be published in the upcoming Pop Up City publication:
“Temporary space practitioners are dispersed throughout the shattered remains of shrinking cities in the United States and Europe, within eddies of vacant lots, abandoned buildings, and radical space strongholds - where community and social relations flourish through the production of art - and thrive as a counterculture of resistance to capitalist circuits of place-making. They temporarily remediate the leftovers of capitalism through radical interventions in urban spaces that begin to poke holes in the dominant frame of the city as an avenue for competition and exchange. Instead, the city is viewed as a place where community can be built and experienced, temporarily, while simultaneously creating alternative temporary uses for, and opportunities within, disused urban spaces. This paper discusses such countercultural urban development strategies through two case studies: the Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor in Chicago, Illinois and Hotel Neustadt in Halle, Germany.”
To read the rest of this article and to read others, be sure to pick up the new Pop Up City journal that will be coming out in February.
by marianne eppig.