Mayors' Institute on City Design

In February 2010, the Remaking Cities Institute hosted a two-day regional conference of the Mayors’ Institute on City Design, a program sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States Conference of Mayors and the American Architectural Foundation.

The closed-door symposium was intended to educate a small group of mayors from seven Midwestern cities about how urban design contributes to the revitalization of cities. The cities were Charleston, WV; Racine, WI; Huntington, WV; Springfield, IL; Kenosha, WI; Canton, OH; and Elkhart, IN.  The mayors, along with eight design professionals from across the U.S., worked together to formulate design-oriented solutions to selected issues facing each city. Remaking Cities Institute researchers traveled to each city in advance, met with key officials and prepared a briefing book with case studies on each city.  The Institute also produced a meeting summary, that includes the case studies, the issues they identified, and the proposed solutions.

Download the briefing book (11 MB) and the meeting summary (1.6 MB).

Read RCI Director Don Carter's article, "Midsize cities, big ideas: The Top 10 take-home messages from the Mayors' Institute on City Design", published March 7, 2010 in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.