GSD Option Studio; Critic: Daniel D’Oca

Baltimore, like many cities of a metropolitan assemblage, has the inherent facility of being read, understood, and maneuvered according to different scales of understanding. It is at once a vital node of the northeast, a defining hub of the Baltimore-DC-Virginia region, and, as a city, identified by its constitutive neighborhoods, distinctive in their own right. These multiple, overlapping, and at times, nested scales provide a richness of community but also evidence inborn problems - most particularly problems of “spatial conflict” and “cross-scalar exclusions.” Spatial conflict is extant because disparate populations, according to their particular scope of understanding, lay claim to and operate on the same spaces of Baltimore. These actors require discordant levels of performance from these places, creating conflict and necessitating amelioration. Additionally, cross-scalar impediments occur because, although Baltimore may perform at metropolitan levels, the advantages of such a status may not trickle down to all of its residents. Baltimorians must be able to more easily access the returns of living in a city of such standing.