Just Baltimore RAVB

Baltimore and Rotterdam are sister cities that share similar histories, geographies, and demographics. Both suffered from the destruction of their urban centers in the 20C Rotterdam in the bombardment of the second world war and Baltimore in the Great fire of 1904, resulting in the renewal of their centers. For this design studio at the Rotterdam Academie van Bouwkunst, Daryl Mulvihill was a research tutor working with a group of students to examine the history of Rotterdams sister city.

Baltimore has an incredibly complex urban history, the first US city to “redline” neighborhoods; a process of economic apartheid which eventually led to the extreme spatial and racial division between black and white communities in the city, that still exists to this day. This process of exclusion led to extreme economic disadvantages for the black communities in the redlined neighborhoods.

In the Research Lab for the design studio, a group of students researched this complex history and its current-day effects on the citizens of Baltimore. The Lab focused each week on a different strand of urban research and students were asked to link the bigger themes to personal stories from residents’ everyday experiences within Baltimore. A wide range of urban topics related to everyday life in Baltimore were researched with each student focusing on their individual interests. The dramatic effect of redlining on neighbourhoods in the city is still evident through a variety of urban problems which residents face in their daily lives such as; the urban heat island effect, food poverty and food deserts, gentrification, housing allocation etc etc.

As a final product, each student created a zine in the activist tradition which became a document of the research and provided a supporting narrative for their design projects.

Just Baltimore Design Studio was carried out together with Wouter Veldhuis | Rowin Petersma | Débora Schiltmans

Students: Merve Boyuk, Alexander van Delft, Juliette Groenendaal, Ester de Rijk, Marina Samveljan, Maarten De Witte, Justus Schaefer, Saskia te Woerd.

Reading List

Local Narratives Baltimore

Allen, D. (2017) A beautiful ghetto. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Chicago Humanities Festival (2015) Ta-Nehisi Coates: Between the World and Me. Available at:

Coates, T.-N. (2016) The beautiful struggle: a memoir.

Coates, T.-N. (2017) Between the World and Me.

Vargas, T. (2016) ‘“I don’t know if people understand what is happening in Baltimore”’, Washington Post, 16 June. Available at: (Accessed: 18 February 2021).

Baltimore Urban History

Ingraham, C. ‘These two maps show the shocking inequality in Baltimore’, Washington Post.

King, P.N., Drabinski, K.S. and Davis, J.C. (2019) Baltimore revisited: stories of inequality and resistance in a U.S. city. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Lanahan, L. (2019) The lines between us: two families and a quest to cross Baltimore’s racial divide. New York: The New Press.

Lowery, W. (2016) They can’t kill us all: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a new era in America’s racial justice movement. First edition. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company.

Pietila, A. (2010) Not in my neighborhood: how bigotry shaped a great American city. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.

Pietila, A. (2018) The ghosts of Johns Hopkins: the life and legacy that shaped an American city. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

Purser, G. (2016) ‘The Circle of Dispossession: Evicting the Urban Poor in Baltimore’, Critical Sociology, 42(3), pp. 393–415.

Just City - The Right to the City

Berman, M., Marcus, D. and Sclan, S. (2017) Modernism in the streets: a life and times in essays. London ; New York: Verso.

Buitelaar, E. (2020) Maximaal gelijk, voldoende vrij. Vier perspectieven op de rechtvaardige stad. Amsterdam: Valiz.

Franke, S. and Veldhuis, W. (2018) Verkenning van de rechtvaardige stad: stedenbouw en de economisering van de ruimte.

Harvey, D. (2013) Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London: Verso.

Harvey, D. David Harvey, The Right to the City, September–October 2008, New Left Review.

Jacobs, J. (1993) The death and life of great American cities. Modern Library ed. New York: Modern Library.

Lefebvre, H., Smith, N. and Bononno, R. (2003) The Urban Revolution. University of Minnesota Press.

McGarvey, D. (2018) Poverty safari: understanding the anger of Britain’s underclass. Paperback edition. London: Picador.

Moskowitz, P.E. (2017) How to kill a city: gentrification, inequality, and the fight for the neighborhood. New York, NY: Nation Books.

Pope, A. (2015) Ladders. 2. ed. New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press.

Sennett, R. (2019) Building and dwelling: ethics for the city.

‘The Right to the City: A Verso Report’

Map showing the redline districts in Baltimore

Inspiration for the presentation taken from the radical zines of the 60s and 70s

A gallery of some of the students work: Justus Schaefer, Marina Samveljan, Saskia te Woerd, Juliette Groenendaal