Beyond Eco-City: Re-Envisioning the Impossible Dream of Dorr Street, Toledo, Ohio

Throughout history, cities have always been extended towards the countryside without contemplating the other direction. While current urban farming practice tends to play a remedial role in our urban design processes and strategies, it is time for a paradigm shift between cities and the organic worlds that sustain them. Meanwhile, emerging eco-cities, such as the Masdar City project, were devised with ecological mechanisms almost exclusively driven by economic imperatives of the dominating political power. As posited by Federico Cugurullo, this kind of ecological modernization “does not change the traditional capitalistic patterns of production and consumption, and thus replicates the same environmental issues intrinsic to capitalism” (2016). This design research experiments ethnographic method in Toledo, Ohio, to generate urban farming prototypes as localized cultural practice. In response to the “Impossible Dream,” a new urban design initiative of the African American Legacy Project of Northwest Ohio, visual narratives of urban farming urbanism are created to address ecological urbanism and social-economic impacts, as well as building programming and cultural events initiatives, with a focus on public and interactive communal spaces.

Iñaki Abalos

Professor in Residence, Department of Architecture, GSD, Harvard University, Cambridge MA, USA

Orazio Carpenzano

Dean, Facoltà di Architettura, Sapienza Università di Roma, Rome

Yung Ho Chang

Professor of Architecture, College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Tongji University, Shanghai, China

Winka Dubbeldam

Founder of Archi-Tectonics, Miller Professor and Chair of Architecture at Stuart Weitzman School of Design

Brian Ford

Professor Emeritus, Department of Architecture & Built Environment, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

Hsinming Fung

Professor, SCI-Arc, Los Angeles CA, USA

Carlo Gasparrini

Professor of Urbanism, Dipartimento di Architettura, Universita' degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Naples, Italy

Rahul Mehrotra

Professor of Urban Design and Planning, GSD, Harvard University, Cambridge MA, USA

Antoine Picon

Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology, GSD, Harvard University, Cambridge MA, USA

Mónica Ponce de León

Dean, School of Architecture, Princeton University, Princeton NJ, USA

Jane Rendell

Professor, The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, London, UK

Peter Rich

Professor of Architecture, Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg, South Africa

Michael Speaks

Dean, School of Architecture, Syracuse University, Syracuse NY, USA

Martha Thorne

Hon FRIBA, Hon COAM, Senior Advisor for The OBEL Award

C David Tseng

Dean, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Chiao-Tung University, Taipei, Taiwan

Sarah Whiting

Dean, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, Cambridge MA, USA

Li Xiangning

Deputy Dean, College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Tongji University, Shanghai, China

Beyond Eco-City: Re-Envisioning the Impossible Dream of Dorr Street, Toledo, Ohio

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