Emergent Opportunities: Urban Design in Small Town Appalachia

This thesis looks at urban design within small town Appalachia and its role in low density and low resource communities.

Small towns are facing a critical juncture in this point in their history. As most areas transition from a heavy depend acne on industrial based economy to an uncertain post-industrial, they face challenges unique to rural areas. Specifically, this thesis looks at “urban design” in distinctly non-urban areas and seeks to answer the question of what is the function and what is the role of design at such a large (urban) scale.

The idea is that what distinguishes small towns from large metropolis is the relationship between the designed and the emergent. Emergent in this context is defined as the aggregate of individual responses to material concerns, other words “people doing what they can with what they have” which becomes the rule for rural areas such as Clay County Kentucky.

The design then is to identify the emerging patterns of organization and strengthen those connections to create a responsive infrastructure. This is necessary because:
1) there is a limit to the scope and ability of individual responses
2) the history of the context sees many projects (some with the best of intentions) fail to engage with the emergent process and reorganize the infrastructure and replace the context compromising its ability to self organize.

So in this particular scheme we are trying to engage with this process with a decentralized model both on the regional and urban scale. This decentralized model is defined by 1) nodes: which have a degree of self sufficiency, have a distinguishable identity but not a singular use and 2) connection: a reciprocal relationship between these point together over long distances by: the visual encoding, physical continuity, and correlative functionality.

In answering that, this thesis hopes to rethink how traditional urban strategies spanning from regional relationships to urban plans to civic architecture work differently in rural areas.