Detail View: Graduate Thesis Collection: The Succession of Place: Returning to Resilience in Cairo, Illinois

Title: 
The Succession of Place: Returning to Resilience in Cairo, Illinois
Creator: 
Fraley, Lauren N.
Subject: 
Thesis (M.U.D.) -- Urban Design
Subject: 
Savannah College of Art and Design -- Department of Urban Design
Rights: 
Copyright is retained by the authors or artists of items in this collection, or their descendants, as stipulated by United States copyright law.
Abstract: 
Throughout history and across ecologies, rivers have played a substantial role in the process of urban planning and settlement. Rivers contribute as a life source, natural highway, defense mechanism, and in recent centuries as the right-hand to industrial manufacturing. The success or decline of river-cities is often subsequent to the ability to adapt temporally, as well as the balance and distribution of uses across the regional landscape. As deindustrialization and place detachment is becoming a recurring issue in river-cities, urban design has a responsibility to unfold the layers of ecology, culture, and commerce, which together form a palimpsest of meaning and change over time, to respond with a long-term, adaptable plan for more resilient river-city relationships.
Abstract: 
Analyzing the succession of place in river-city settings through the lens of regionalism and ownership, along with the ecological fluctuation and shifting landscape of river systems, forms the premise of this urban design concept, which specifically looks at the city of Cairo, Illinois, which sits at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Historically Cairo served as a crucial industrial and transportation hinge for the river valley. Over the past century, the city has experienced deindustrialization as well as numerous flooding events, resulting in job loss, population decline, and social as well as physical decay.
Abstract: 
Recognizing the current state of decline as an opportunity to initiate succession through a series of phases becomes part one of this exploration: dismantle infrastructure. Simultaneously, processes of bioremediation will be deployed as a way to detox the city as it returns to its baseline landscape, a natural floodplain. Part two is the idea of instilling memory through an earthworks burial mound for the city.In the process of dismantling the city, materials will be collected to form the salvage-fill for the earthworks, becoming cultural artifacts and physical reminders of place. From there, this thesis will explore the concept of rebirth as a means of returning to and reclaiming the land as shifting river landscape.
Publisher: 
Savannah, Georgia : Savannah College of Art and Design
Date: 
2013-05
Format: 
PDF : 102 p. : ill