Pop Up City, a series that explores temporary uses of urban spaces, was cooked up by young Cleveland designers and landscape artists who peered into the dark façades and remnant steel structures of long-gone industry and imagined a cooler future.

Part of the inspiration comes from artists Tore Dobberstein and Andreas Haase of Berlin who reuse the abandoned structures of Germany’s industrial landscape for “sport." For example, they filled entire rooms in an abandoned warehouse with big foam rubber cubes to make it safe for skater boys and BMXers to launch themselves, wheels and all, off an overhanging loft or a banister (the Free Times reported on this phenomenon at last year’s Shrinking Cities exhibit at Spaces Gallery).

These "Sportification" ideas have been implemented in a number of large, government-sponsored projects in East Germany’s Ruhr Valley—that country’s Rust Belt—where artists turned abandoned steel mills into large outdoor recreation centers. Giant steel tanks—like the ones still dotting Cleveland’s Industrial Flats from the old Standard Oil days—were converted to underwater diving tanks. Or ramparts of steel towers and old bridges are now preserved as public art serving as a cool destination for tourists or the backdrop for a future movie set.

To date, Cleveland’s big success story with “sportification” is probably Ray’s Indoor Mountain Bike Park, where Ray Petro, a local tradesman and avid cyclist, converted an abandoned 97,000 sq. ft. industrial warehouse into the world’s first indoor mountain bike and bmx park (which draws thousands of mostly young men from across the country to its W. 98th and Walford Road location).

Klaus Overmeyer, hipster landscape artist and author of Urban Pioneers, which illustrates the boom in DIY industrial space reuse in his hometown of Berlin, will join Dobberstein and Haase for a workshop in Cleveland on Feb. 27 as part of Pop Up City. Hosted by Urban Design Center of Northeast Ohio (UDC), they will lead a day-long exploration of sites to bring back from the dead in Cleveland through temporary use. Participants are encouraged to make recommendations for potential sites to look at when they register. As a result of the workshop, UDC will select and implement at least one temporary use project for a Cleveland neighborhood.

Overmeyer describes the type of gritty, post-industrial off-the-grid planning that worked in Berlin: “Skate-parks in abandoned industrial estates, ponies grazing alongside the Berlin Wall, flea markets in disused warehouses, music and fashion in hard-to-let stores and climbing walls in empty building lots – scarcely a city in Europe has been so radically characterized by temporary use projects as has Berlin.”

Pop Up City launched last November, uncorking some of Ingenuity’s zeitgeist when it attracted hundreds of young holiday shoppers to the annual alternative craft fair, Bazaar Bizarre, in a vacant storefront in the Sincere Building on East 4th Street. “It provided an exciting one-day shopping experience in a part of the city that lacks retail activity,” Cleveland Neighborhood Development Coalition wrote.

Pop Up City events continue on Feb. 29 with Leap Night in the Flats East Bank. Temporary installations include a “dead” Christmas tree orchard, snowboarding ramp, frozen pond on Old River Road for ice skating and live music, food from local sources, and bonfires all bringing some good wholesome fun back to the Flats.

Like the ongoing discussion of how to design for a Shrinking City, Pop Up City raises important questions of how to deal with the impact of suburban sprawl and a city that perhaps covers too much area for the size of its population. Shrinking Cities and Pop Up City focus creativity on smaller areas—whether its reusing the industrial fragments or reforesting emptied out neighborhoods—with the goal of adding new life back to the city.

See the Pop Up City promo movie.