Part 1 of a two-part series focusing on developing a method of urban therapy for a Cleveland catharsis

Cleveland’s narrative is still stuck in the shadow of its concern that the other shoe will soon drop. And so like anyone or any group hunched in a position of defense, the aim then is often to restrict the flow around us, if only to isolate and secure what as a city we have left. This is not, however, how cities are re-built: with clenched fists and risk aversion—or that reliance on never giving up the mold of how we grew the Forest City up out of its lightlessness. Because times change, things shift. And the sooner we embrace our "destruction" the quicker we can expose the last gasp from the holding of our collective breath.

So what’s needed, perhaps, is a letting go of sorts, or the enabling of a belief that: it’s okay Cleveland, mistakes have been made, promises broken, and people have left. But certainty in predicting our own demise is neither a certainty nor a comfort. Rather its disallowing the possibilities that come with accepting that we live in uncertain, abandoned, and indeed beautifully exciting times.

Still, is such a collective catharsis even possible? Or more exactly: do there exist ways to release a city’s doubt as there are ways to alleviate the uncertainties pushing down a person’s life? In a word: yes—the healing of groups has been done before. And it has been done up to the point where whole locales have been able to turn a page if only to brighten a wishing for betterment back into a more determined grip that things will turn around.

Some examples, here, will help, and they vary according to the discipline used to create a narrative shift, as well as the type of collective hang-up being addressed. As for the latter, issues can range from the effect of war ruins—to a region’s battles with seasonal depression—to a community’s psychic pain resulting from the degradation of their environment. Regardless of the type, such living experiments can serve as precedents to the development of Cleveland’s own therapeutic approach. And it as an approach that must yell into blamelessness the rather quiet sense of loss that has come to wedge into the split of the city’s identity.

• Hiroshima and the Atom Dome

War is the ultimate psychic shock. And in the case of collective disruption, it can destroy the roads and places of familiarity, in effect shaking up the security that citizens got in knowing their way around. To rebuild from ruins is thus a great task, as architects and planners are not only form makers, but they are urban therapists either allowing (or not) the truth to grow out of the wreckage that where a city once was it has since left. If this isn’t done—or if the city is re-built as if nothing had happened—then the people will feel it, regardless if the ruins are replaced with the cleanest looking lines meant to point to where the future is headed.

One of the greatest transformative examples of a city of ruins was in Hiroshima. Here, one of the only buildings remaining—the Commercial Exhibition Hall—was turned into the Atom Bomb Dome: the centerpiece of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park which is a sprawling greenspace decked with community centers and monuments. In fact, the Dome and Park have been acknowledged as a formed memory driving the identity of Hiroshima from a place of great destruction to its current distinction as Japan’s official City of Peace, as well as an attraction worldwide.

• Helsinki’s Forces of Light

Issues of vulnerability often remain unspoken, living instead like a heavy emptiness inside the chest of a tin man. Back in 1995 urban designer Charles Landry was challenged to bring to light (literally) such a silent suffering, particularly a regional prevalence of seasonal depression affecting Finland during its long, dark winters.

What followed, then, was an especially creative method of planning, one in which Landry demonstrated the fact that darkness is not simply the emptiness of light, but rather a canvas from which man-made light can be seen. Specifically, Landry conceived of an annual Forces of Light festival that involved city-wide light installations and performances, as well lantern parades marching through the city fabric. Here, Landry not only turned the city’s darkness into a strength, but he emphasized creative participatory involvement which allowed the Finnish peoples to rework those unspoken difficulties with seasonal depression in a way that was not only culturally conducive, but which also fostered growth. In fact, the festival has grown ten-fold since its inception.

• The AMD&ART Park

There was a decades-old belief in Vintondale that nothing good ever happened there. The belief grew out of its battered beginnings as a mine town, and then its more recent circumstances as a town abandoned of its jobs but not its consequence of industry. Particularly, the town’s waterway—the Blacklick Creek—was left red and uninhabitable by the effects of acid mine drainage. In other words—and not unlike Cleveland—the promises to pay the sins of pollution were no longer present, making the pain from their hurt land as real as it was meant to be.

Enter Allan Comp, a historic preservationist who specializes in industrial sites. What Comp has done is blend the science of ecological preservation with the symbolism of art, and in turn has re-created not only the health of the Blacklick Creek, but he has reintegrated the identity of a community by documenting its own evolution at points along the creek’s flow.

Of first importance is the method of the creek’s health, as it is really an ecological design masterpiece staging the visible clearing of the acid. In short, the remediation consists of a series of six pools flowing down into each other, with a filtering system enabling a constant clearing of the water with each successive cascade. Connecting, then, this symbolism from the waterway with a greater community regeneration, the park’s design involves citizenry participating to allow for a parallel cleansing that comes with enabling empowerment out of the inertia. To wit: landscaping entailed community tree planting sessions along the creek’s edges, with tree type dictated by matching the fall foliage with the corresponding hue of the water in its stage of cleansing. Furthering the symbolism, sculptures include a series of “blank slates” bridging the treatment ponds and nearby wetlands, as well as a granite memorial wall with life-size miners walking from what was the entrance into the mine.

In short, the AMD&ART Park that Comp and Vintondale built took the reality coming from the sins of the industrial promise and bettered it, all the while turning the hurt of abandonment back into the promise that comes with a chance to cleanse the mind via the cleansing of the land.

Next, Part II will discuss a possible plan for Cleveland’s own urban therapeutic approach.