Fringe Cities
Investing in the future of small and mid-sized cities
Many cities and towns are grappling with the coinciding loss of major industries and the legacy of government interventions like Urban Renewal. Fringe cities struggle with aging infrastructure, underutilized assets, and disinvestment in youth and civic leadership. These cities often bear the brunt of historical injustices, including deindustrialization, discriminatory housing, and environmental degradation, while facing mounting challenges like climate change and housing affordability.
Iwan Baan
Youth Opportunity Union, Poughkeepsie, NY
Maple Street Housing, Poughkeepsie, NY
Hudson Valley Farm Hub, Hurley, NY
The Fringe City Design Lab unlocks the potential of America’s smaller cities by investing in their people, places, and public systems.
These cities hold extraordinary assets: cultural heritage, civic pride, underutilized buildings, and passionate local leadership. By combining community-driven design with strategic policy and partnership, we can help Fringe Cities revitalize infrastructure, promote belonging, and build pathways to ecological and economic resilience.
Iwan Baan
We partner with local governments and civic organizations to co-create built projects that catalyze reinvestment.
These include youth and cultural centers, inclusive housing models, reactivated waterways, and public spaces that reflect the community’s identity—each serving as a replicable model for small-city transformation.
Case Study: Scenic Hudson
Scenic Hudson, an organization that helped create the modern environmental conservation movement, wanted to showcase their longstanding commitment not only to the planet but to the local community as well. The abandoned Standard Gage Factory, built in the 1800s, once a significant contributor to the World War II effort, was to become a sustainable hub for the Northside Neighborhood.
The opportunity was not only to clean up and repurpose the brownfield site but also to create a sustainable pandemic-resilient office space that addressed the needs of the local community, including providing outdoor recreational space, a public auditorium, and commercial opportunities. This led to a net-zero, all-electric mechanical system that integrates historic passive ventilation features of the building with new technology.
The design successfully transformed a contaminated industrial site that has been a liability to Poughkeepsie for decades into a regenerative, climate-positive community hub, promoting sustainability and resilience. MASS's efforts in securing funding from key organizations like the National Park Service, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority advocated for changes in design guidelines to support progressive sustainability measures in historic buildings. The project is phase one of the restoration of the post-industrial waterway that weaves through the City, which will be unfolding in the coming years with the support of New York State.
