Fringe Cities Exhibition
Fringe Cities: Legacies of Renewal in the Small American City explored the Fringe City—small, independently situated municipalities severely impacted by urban renewal. Developed in partnership with the Center for Architecture in New York, the exhibition was on view from October 2, 2019 through January 18, 2020.
Between 1949 and 1974, the US federal government invested billions of dollars in urban infrastructure through a series of planning, demolition, and construction programs collectively known as urban renewal. Originally packaged as anti-poverty initiatives, the programs often exacerbated existing issues by reinforcing segregation, bisecting downtown cores with highways, and destroying historic structures.
While many large cities have rebounded from these social and spatial traumas, smaller cities often continue to struggle with the same problems that urban renewal sought to resolve.
Fringe Cities presented a snapshot of MASS’s ongoing investigations into several smaller municipalities—Easton, Pennsylvania; Saginaw, Michigan; Spartanburg, South Carolina; and Poughkeepsie, New York. By examining design’s role in mapping and selling strategies for renewal, exhibition organizers sought to understand the local implications and legacies of this era of rapid, large-scale change. The case studies serve as cautionary tales, urging reflection by identifying strategies for local, community-driven regeneration.
The exhibition’s ground floor included didactics to help viewers understand the Fringe City concept. A timeline delineated the social, economic, and political dimensions of urban transformations in the US from 1920 to 2020; aerial images of 42 of the 100 identified Fringe Cities helped viewers visualize the locations and scopes of urban renewal projects across small American cities.
Additionally, a selection of the era’s urban investment planning documents explored designers’ role in selling renewal. These included renderings, diagrams, and illustrations of possible futures, many of which were never realized.
The exhibition continued examining the four case-study cities on the lower floor with unique accounts of the Fringe City experience. While the locations share common narratives of spatial transformation, these interventions’ impacts vary across context—a growing distrust of development in Easton, environmental injustice in Spartanburg, and fractured density in Saginaw.
Poughkeepsie, the site of MASS’s Hudson Valley office, is highlighted with a map of projects led by local change agents that address the legacies of urban renewal. The space also includes photography by Iwan Baan.
