Under the bas relief and gilded columns of St. Josaphat’s, a church converted to an arts hall in Cleveland’s once-mighty Midtown industrial corridor, artists at the Shrinking Cities Symposium explained their approach to the issue of refashioning rust-belt cities.

“This is not about accepting defeat,” Terry Schwarz says about the international program, which her employer Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative helped bring to Cleveland. “We should encourage economic development, but also recognize that the city has changed in a significant way. How do we begin envisioning the city we want to become?”

The Shrinking Cities exhibits at the CUDC and Spaces Gallery set the stage for reusing the empty fields and idle buildings at the center of 20th century powerhouses like Detroit and Cleveland, both of which lost more than half their population. Also part of an international study were Liverpool/Manchester, Ivanovo in Russia and Leipzig/Halle in the former East Germany, where ideas like urban farming and converting industrial plants into sports complex are being tested.

Acres of land slowly reverting to nature, a deeply engrained industrial heritage and people living in cities struggling with gross inequities are the real canvas for artists Kyong Park, Mel Chin, Frances Whitehead, and Elke Knoess & Wolfgang Grillitsch, who flew in from Germany where the Federal Cultural Foundation funds the work of the Shrinking Cities Institute.

“The biggest danger is the suburbanization of the inner city,” says Park, referring perhaps to McMansions on large lots and cul-de-sacs. Founder/Director of the International Center for Urban Ecology (NYC, NY), Park lived and worked in Detroit for 10 years and documented the urban/suburban schism in books and on film. “Self-generated ideas might be the best solution.”

Park’s statement led an audience member from East Cleveland to comment, “You’re not dissecting what it is about suburban life we don’t want to see in the city. How do we get people to bring things that are healthy from the suburbs? How do we engage people who are locked into these spaces?”

Mel Chin’s ecological artwork includes sculptured landscapes that draw toxins from the soil. “The contaminated soil is transformed back into rich earth, capable of sustaining a diverse ecosystem," Chin wrote about Revival Field, which tapped his knowledge of alchemy and botany. He is currently working on a large-scale remediation project in New Orleans that he hopes could be a test case for Cleveland and East Cleveland.

Young parents and partners in Berlin-based Peanutz Architekten, Knoess and Grillitsch have staged a series of public art events where they craft a clever temporary use of space. They include converting balconies of apartments into places for sport or ‘business’, and converting an industrial channel into a "non-swimming" club.

“(Author) Umberto Eco said, ‘things are semantically worn out long before their materials are.’ We’re semantically reloading places,” says Knoess.

Turning closer to home, Spaces artist-in-resident Whitehead presented Superorg, an ecological art project focused on the regeneration of the Cuyahoga River valley. With fellow Chicago artist Lisa Norton, they explored ways that the cultural and industrial heritage of the valley could be renewed at Steelyard Commons.

The Towpath Trail and recycling waste as a new product are both about conveyance. Slag, a steel-making waste product from nearby Mittal could be modified into a cement to build the Towpath Trail (Mittal told Whitehead they’re interested in buying a grinding machine to process water-cooled slag for that purpose). Nearby Washington Park Horticulture High School could study test plots for native plants that grow in slag-resistant soil. Computer kiosks along the Towpath could tell the story of regeneration.

The artist leaves some inspiration for rethinking the natural capital that exists in cities and older towns like Cleveland, Youngstown and Detroit. What we do with these built-in resources is a matter of imagination, strength of will, technological know-how and maybe a few willing business partners.