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ETD Abstract Container

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A Community of Memory: How a City’s Past Can Inform its Future

Gibson, Kenna M
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1583999347823231

Abstract Details

2020, MARCH, University of Cincinnati, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning: Architecture.
Memory represents who we are, our habits, our ideologies, and our hopes and fears, but it also gives an indication of who we will become. How do we move into the future and allow the weight of our past to not diminish, but grow? In 1970, no one could have, or would have, predicted the deterioration of Youngstown, Ohio less than ten years later. The downfall of postwar vibrancy built on steel and the backs of mill workers seemed improbable and impossible. The end of federally-funded rebuilding, and overall lack of federal policy, in 1974 coincided with the beginning of severe population loss and economic decline throughout the United States. These once dense, active cities quickly lost their life, relegated to mere shells of their former selves. Rust Belt cities are defined by extreme post-industrial population loss in a region strongly identified with production and industry. It is because of this industry, the lifeblood of the city and the support of its economy and working-class neighborhoods, that such an abrupt and startling loss was created in Youngstown. Rust Belt cities are a parallel universe where lives, economies, and industries shift but the city remains. Rust Belt cities are essentially unraveling. People connect to a place through their memory of it. Memory of the Rust Belt, the glory days and what has been, is very important for residents of these lost and often forgotten cities. The Rust Belt is a place of loss, despair, and ruin, but connecting with a city and its residents on a personal level is much more telling than simply looking at statistics. Hybridized building programs adapt to revitalize specific sites within the city of Youngstown, Ohio. This hybridization brings together unexpected urban conditions, users, social issues, and building functions. Divergent themes such as the planned and spontaneous, homogeneous and diverse, explicit and subversive, synthetic and organic, create architecture capable of combining unorthodox functions and processes. The final project culminates in the proposal of building typologies and adaptive infrastructure within the greater context of the post-industrial environment of the Rust Belt.
Elizabeth Riorden, M.Arch. (Committee Chair)
Michael McInturf, M.Arch. (Committee Member)
77 p.
Architecture
Architecture; Urban Renewal; Youngstown; Industrial; Adaptive reuse

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Gibson, K. M. (2020). A Community of Memory: How a City’s Past Can Inform its Future [Master's thesis, University of Cincinnati]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1583999347823231

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Gibson, Kenna. A Community of Memory: How a City’s Past Can Inform its Future. 2020. University of Cincinnati, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1583999347823231.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Gibson, Kenna. "A Community of Memory: How a City’s Past Can Inform its Future." Master's thesis, University of Cincinnati, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1583999347823231

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

ucin1583999347823231
118
© 2020, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License A Community of Memory: How a City’s Past Can Inform its Future by Kenna M Gibson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by University of Cincinnati and OhioLINK.