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Edmund Bacon, the former urban planner for the city of Philadelphia, once described urban synergy as a process that successfully synthesizes disparate and often competing economic, social, and political forces in which the result is greater than the sum of the constituent parts (Warfield 1995). SynergiCity, therefore, is more than merely a master plan proposal: It is a visionary concept for the wholesale redevelopment of the postindustrial city. It is an evolution of a process we initiated, first as a graduate architecture design studio and, later, as a research project that proposed to transform the postindustrial city from a forgotten footnote to history into a lively, dynamic urban center. Our research then became a dialogue—among a group of urban design experts throughout the nation—that analyzed the postindustrial city and its sustainable redevelopment in terms of urban design and planning , architecture, and sustainability. This book is the end result. Duringthespring2009and2010academicterms, two teams of graduate architecture students under our supervision at the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, developed master plan proposals for the Warehouse District of the city of Peoria, Illinois. We selected Peoria because of its industrial history, strategic location on the Illinois River, and the scale and potential for redevelopment of its existing warehouse district. As urban designers and preservation architects, we saw opportunities for ecological development of the entire district, ranging from development of infrastructure and transportation to adaptive use of existing buildings with new architecture and urban spaces. In developing the master plan proposals, we determined two primary goals for the warehouse district redevelopment: environmental stewardship and economic development. As a “steward” of the Illinois River, Peoria has an obligation to protect and sustain the natural environment and its most precious resources: clean air, fresh water, and its people. Consequently, developing sustainable design proposals that synthesize ecology and economic development with social needs is imperative. Soonafterwebeganourfirstdesignstudio,events in Illinois and throughout the nation compelled us to consider broader implications of redesigning the existing warehouse district. In January 2009, the Great Recession began to take hold in Peoria and throughout the Midwest. Caterpillar, Peoria’s largest employer and a Fortune 50 company, announced that it would lay off 20,000 workers, sending a tremor throughout the Illinois economy. In our architectural studio, we began to consider broader economic challenges facing Peoria. Could Peoria reinvent itself? And, on a broader scale, how could the design professions—architecture, planning, urban design, historic preservation, and landscape architecture—play a significant role in meeting challenges facing other postindustrial cities in the Midwest and elsewhere? Economic and industrial decline is very real in Illinois and its surrounding states. Addressing the Commerce Committee of the Illinois General Assembly in February 2011, Dr. Geoffrey J. D. Hewings, professor of economics and director of the Regional Economics Application Laboratory at the University of Illinois, presented a sobering summary of the state of the Illinois economy. Illinois was losing both jobs and population; it had lost 320,000 jobs in the 2008–2009 recession. In fact, Introduction Pa u l Ha r d i n Kapp and Paul J. Armstrong As a designer you are capable of developing a concept which melds buildings together, creates synergy, and is exciting. If you worry about the details at the beginning [of the design process], you just get fragments. [If] you let the plan flow out of you . . . it [becomes] a reality. Edmund Bacon, 1991–92 Plym Distinguished Professor of Architecture, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Introduction x Illinois had never recovered from the last recession of 2000-2001 and had been in an “employment recession ” for the past 10 years. This had resulted in a loss of 455,000 jobs in Illinois since the state’s last peak job period in November 2000. Hewings asserted that in the past decade Illinois had lost over $6 billion in tax revenue; furthermore, thousands of talented and skilled workers had migrated out of state to seek work and opportunities. If not addressed , the loss of human capital through out-migration , he warned, could have dire consequences, such as a continuing loss of at least $1 billion in annual revenue and a continued decline of the state’s average per capita income. In closing, Hewings told the legislators that the two primary goals for growing the Illinois economy should be to stem the outflow of talented young people and to find ways to generate more wealth for all Illinois citizens (Hewings 2011). As architecture design instructors with...

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