What About the Valley?
Project: What About The Valley? Handbook
Research and Concept Study: Ongoing
Location: The Lower Cuyahoga River Valley, Cleveland, Ohio
Size: 12,480 Acres
Symposium: Op-City
Organizer: UCLA CityLab
Collaborator: Nick Pevsner
What About the Valley? (WATV?) is a prompt to the people of Cleveland. Its purpose is two-fold:
- To make legible the latent civic and ecological potential of the lower Cuyahoga River Valley–known locally as the industrial valley.
- To catalyze increased public awareness of, and engagement with this territory through the deployment of discrete, coordinated territorial occupants and modifiers.
WATV? takes the ambition of the Re-Cultivating the Forest City project and endeavors to articulate fresh ways of seeing, navigating, marking and occupying the Lower Cuyahoga River Valley. This work is emphatically not a master plan. Nor is it a set of generic planning bullet points. Rather, WATV? is a catalogue of potential design events and interventions that endeavor to build an audience and momentum for the civic reoccupation of the Lower Cuyahoga Valley. As an alternative to a singular, fixed image of what the Valley might become, this initiative endeavors to open up a conversation with the people of Cleveland about the latent potential of the Lower Cuyahoga River Valley as a unique, productive 21st century civic landscape.
