Highway to The Bottom: Recasting Baltimore's Highway to Nowhere

Abstract

This thesis explores the potential for the landscape architect to flip the script on designing with remnant landscapes from the mid-20th century era of urban renewal, focusing on West Baltimore’s Highway to Nowhere. The form and materiality of the sunken highway have become ingrained in the cultural landscape; there is an opportunity to design a new landscape typology from this existing infrastructure, without modifying its form or material. Through resurfacing historic residential and commercial fabric and making the site ecologically productive for surrounding context, the Highway to Nowhere is recast as the Highway to The Bottom. The Highway to The Bottom operates in opposition to the structures undergirding it: annexation/blotting, demolition, and greenwashing. This thesis recasts these obstructions as productive design frameworks in the form of ownership, material, and experience, all as expressions of the hole in the ground in West Baltimore.