DIY Historic Preservation: A Conversation with Dan Campo
Join us as Dan Campo discusses his new book Postindustrial DIY: Recovering American Rust Belt Icons (Fordham University Press, 2024) with Special Projects Director Juan Rivero.
The culmination of more than a dozen years of on-the-ground investigation, ethnography, and historical analysis, Postindustrial DIY chronicles grassroots efforts to recover, rebuild, and enjoy architecturally iconic but economically obsolete places in the American Rust Belt. It assesses the efforts of do-it-yourself actors who have craftily remade former industrial sites into collective preservation projects and democratic grounds for arts and culture, environmental engagement, regional celebrations, itinerant play, and in-the-moment constructions. Their projects are generating excitement about the prospect of Rust Belt life, even as they often fall short of professional preservation or environmental reclamation standards.
The citizen preservationists and urbanists described in this book offer looser, more playful, and often more publicly satisfying alternatives to the development practices that have transformed iconic sites into expensive real estate or a clean slate for the next profitable endeavor. Transcending the disciplinary boundaries of architecture, historic preservation, city planning, and landscape architecture, Postindustrial DIY suggests new ways to engage, adapt, and preserve architecturally compelling sites and bottom-up strategies for urban revival.
Daniel Campo is an urbanist and associate professor and chair of the Department of Design and Planning in the School of Architecture and Planning at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland. He also serves as the director of Morgan’s graduate program in City and Regional Planning. He is the author of Postindustrial DIY: Recovering American Rustbelt Icons and The Accidental Playground: Brooklyn Waterfront Narratives of the Undesigned and Unplanned (Fordham University Press, 2013). He has also written articles about urban design and development, public space studies, economic development, historic preservation, history of the built environment, downtown revitalization, waterfront studies, urban parks and public art. He holds a Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from the University of Pennsylvania and a Master of Urban Planning from Hunter College and was previously a planner for the New York City Department of City Planning.
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