RE-RO(O/U)TING: Reconfiguring mobilities and materialities through the design of a green-blue infrastructure corridor in Baltimore, Maryland

Abstract

This thesis engages with Ecological Urbanism through a literature review and design project. Through a literature review which reads ecological urbanism with other contemporary social theory, the thesis raises a question: how might an approach centering the materiality of landscape and its relation to mobility inform the interdisciplinary work of translation and interpretation which is central to ecological urbanism? This approach is examined through a design project examining the landscape of the lower Jones Falls, a small, culverted urban river. The project profiles some of the past and present mobilities and materialities shaping this urban environment. These observations inform a design project envisioning a daylighting of the culverted Jones Falls as a focal intervention in the reimagination of an urban expressway corridor as a twenty-first century ecological mobility corridor: a landscape of green and blue spaces, ecological infrastructure multimodal streetscapes, and a reinvigorated public realm.