Assistant Professor McLain Clutter’s essay Cleveland:Mediplex City has been included in the collected volume Formerly Urban: Projecting Rust Belt Futures, from New City Books and Princeton Architectural Press. The essays analyze the political, economic and aesthetic relationship between the city of Cleveland and the Cleveland Clinic, positing a unique symbiosis between the Clinic’s vitality and Cleveland’s urban blight. The essay is intended to establish a problematic around which the relationship between healthcare infrastructure and post-industrial cities may be renegotiated.
Edited by Julia Czerniak, Formerly Urban is a collection of essays grounded in the belief that design, in all its manifestations, must play a central role in the revitalization of shrinking cities in America. The essays argue that only by participating from an urban project’s inception can designers help shape design policy and the design of public works. Formerly Urban is for practitioners, urban thinkers, and anyone participating in the renewal and revitalization of our formerly urban centers. The volume includes essays by Clutter, Charles Waldheim, Roger Sherman, Edward Mitchell, Mark Robbins and others.