Reverse Urbanization
An Adaptive Grid for Territorial Repair2026 – present
Reverse Urbanization starts from a simple inversion. Historically, the survey grid has divided land in order to intensify it: the finer the parcel, the more development it was expected to carry. Reverse Urbanization keeps the grid but subdivides most finely where ground is most damaged, so that density marks the need for repair rather than the promise of growth. This method reads terrain against Superfund listings, toxic release inventories, and intact habitat cores. From that reading, an adaptive grid refines itself over contaminated and degraded ground and thins to nothing where land needs no intervention. Each refined cell becomes a unit of stewardship: a zone of remediation and ecological succession. Tested across the Cuyahoga watershed and the township of Tallmadge, Ohio, the project re-reads the inherited geometry of the continental survey. It treats that geometry as an instrument that can be reorganized. Boundaries become thresholds of care, and urbanization proceeds in reverse, beginning with ecological expansion rather than urban growth.
︎︎︎ Regional Plan of the Cuyahoga Valley: hazardous waste, Superfund listings and toxic release inventories read against intact habitat cores.
︎︎︎ Adaptive subdivision applied to existing fabric; strips thin to nothing where ground needs no repair.
︎︎︎ Territorial Plan: Terrain and toxicity combined into an intensity function driving adaptive subdivision.
Four perspective studies between closed forest matrix and open prairie in collaboration with Joseph Perry (1000 Samples):
