The artist Gaia puts up the first installation in what he calls "a museum for street art." (Photo by Martha Cooper.)

Street artists from around the world are descending on Baltimore this spring to take part in an ambitious — and totally legal — exhibition, producing murals for an event designed to bring new life to a transitional neighborhood.

Launched this month and running through the end of May, Open Walls Baltimore is the city’s first officially sanctioned street art exhibition. Twenty walls throughout the Station North Arts and Entertainment District will serve as backdrops for murals that will be created over the course of several weeks. The walls to be painted are a mix of both private homes and commercial buildings, and represent both occupied and vacant structures. “It’s a museum for street art,” says the artist Gaia, who is curating the event.

Gaia put up the first mural earlier this month — an oversized carrier pigeon adorning an empty building at a major intersection in Station North. With its ample warehouse space, cheap rent, and proximity to the city’s train station, the district has long been a haven for students from the nearby Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) as well as for professional visual and performing artists, musicians, filmmakers, and other creative entrepreneurs. Before Duff Goldman became the Ace of Cakes, he performed guerilla cooking shows in a warehouse here; musician Dan Deacon and his Wham City Arts got their start in the district’s Copycat Building.

Gaia curated the Open Walls Baltimore show in the Station North Arts and Entertainment District. (Photo by Martha Cooper.)

But this is also a place that never fully recovered from the 1968 race riots and decades of urban disinvestment. The community suffers from high vacancy, empty lots, low incomes, and crime. “Many people look at [Open Walls] as an art activity, but from our point of view at the bank, this is a neighborhood revitalization play,” says Will Backstrom, community development banking manager for PNC, who helped develop and fund Open Walls through the PNC Foundation. The project also received funding through a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, and was organized by Station North Arts & Entertainment, LLC.

Backstrom had seen Gaia’s work around Baltimore and then he saw the 2010 documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop about the rising street art phenomenon. Around the same time he read a story in a Maryland business journal about how street art in Miami was spurring new business. Backstrom says he does not have hard data on the return on investment for a city embracing a street art project like Open Walls, but anecdotally there are reports of it being an economic driver. “In Miami, a new moped company started just so people could tour the city’s street art,” he says.

It’s hard to pinpoint when, exactly, street art tipped from illegal enterprise to mainstream arts activity, but it’s safe to say that it was in the groundwater by May 2007 when the anonymous street artist Banksy earned a profile in The New Yorker and people like Brad Pitt started collecting street art. Cities like Philadelphia, Atlanta, Los Angeles, London, Barcelona, and others have appropriated what was once an illegal art form for economic revitalization purposes.

“You go to the Wynwood [neighborhood in Miami] because you want to see a Shepard Fairey,” Gaia says. “You want to see artwork that has established some fame and recognition and has become a gem. The art there is raising property values.”

Street artist Maya Hayuk, working her magic in the clear light of day. (Photo by Martha Cooper.)

Open Walls is not seen as a panacea for a struggling neighborhood, rather it’s happening in concert with a number of other endeavors. In Station North there is new affordable live/work space for artists, and a new Baltimore Montessori Public Charter School. An abandoned clothing factory will soon be home to a design school for public middle and high school students, and nearby MICA, a private arts college, is investing heavily in the area. Slowly but surely, businesses are returning, coffee shops are opening, theaters and galleries are welcoming patrons.

Open Walls aims to capitalize on the international reputation of participating street artists, including New York’s Swoon and Portugal’s Vhils, to draw new people into the district.  “There are a lot of good thing happening in Station North, but they are not known to a broader audience,” Backstrom says. “This is a way to put gas on the fire of what is happening already and to get potential investors into the neighborhood. Our goal is to get people to buy vacant houses and buildings.”

The use of street art as an economic development tool is an ironic turn, considering that many artists have used their work to draw attention to injustice or imbalance in the ecosystem of the city. Much of Gaia’s street art in Baltimore offers a critique of a capitalistic society built on private property and the disinvestment in the American city. With Open Walls, he and his contemporaries are embracing official events that could, if successful, raise property values and price out existing residents.

Maya Hayuk's wall. (Photo by Martha Cooper.)

Gaia recognizes this. “If this results in the neighborhood flipping, it will be a tremendous failure and I will feel really guilty,” he says. “But I don’t think it will. We’ve gotten good at trying to save neighborhoods while also being sensitive to the existing population.”

In Station North this includes working with the local neighborhood associations and the city on things such as tax breaks for working artists, affordable housing developments, and programs like the mayor’s new Vacants to Value initiative that makes it easier for potential homebuyers to purchase city-owned vacant property.

“We’re so burdened in America by the real estate holdings of people, we’re so burdened by this presence of difficult properties sitting inert and then suddenly all of the invisible forces come together and they can literally transform it overnight,” Gaia says. “This neighborhood has sat idly with more than 150 abandoned properties. It is primed and ready for change.”

Photo by Bridgette Wynn.

When people ask me why I write about architecture, design, and cities — why I focus on these topics instead of all of the others — I like to tell the story of a park bench.

I first read this story many years ago in a book of essays on urbanism. It starts auspiciously enough with the development of a new neighborhood outside of Los Angeles. The developers promoted the neighborhood as one of inclusivity, a place where community would reign supreme. They designed everything from the houses to the garbage cans and the sidewalks.

The park benches they selected were shaped like horseshoes. I assumed the design was to encourage people to face one another and strike up a conversation, but I was wrong. A person cannot sleep on a curve. The bench was designed to be “bum proof” in order to keep the “wrong” kind of person out of this “inclusive” community.

Design is everywhere and it has the power to galvanize community or to thwart it. It can empower or it can disenfranchise. Today there is a growing awareness about the role that design plays in our day-to-day lives. The profession is waking up to the idea of human-centered design, which focuses on the needs of the community as a whole and a belief that good design is that which serves the greater good.

There’s only one problem: Large swaths of our communities are not participating in the design process.

Take architecture. There are about 105,000 registered architects in the United States. According to The Directory of African American Architects, a database sponsored by the Center for the Study of Practice at the University of Cincinnati, there are 1,829 licensed African American architects in the country. Of those, less than 300 are women. The stats are not much better in other design fields — landscape architecture, urban planning, product design.

Why?

Seventh grade students transforming a Detroit community garden. (Photo by Manal Kadry.)

Michelle White believes two things contribute to this disparity: exposure and access. White is the principal of the Henry Ford Academy: School for Creative Studies (HFA) in downtown Detroit. Her public charter middle and high school opened in 2009 and currently serves 690 students. Ninety-eight percent are African American. “We don’t have many minorities in the design field and so there are few role models in the career to show kids the profession,” she says. “There is also a lack of access to the skill-building and academic development needed to go into technical fields, including architecture and design.”

Founded by the College for Creative Studies, an art and design institution, and the nonprofit Henry Ford Learning Institute, which creates public schools in public spaces and hands-on learning programs, White’s school aims to give Detroit’s public school students exposure and access to design thinking and professions. The curriculum was developed in partnership with design firm IDEO and Stanford’s d.school and uses design and the arts as a foundation. Students spend the academic year solving design challenges that carry across all subjects and out into the city itself. Seventh graders have created a new community garden and a series of public service announcements on bullying. Eleventh graders focus on entrepreneurship, with many of their design prototypes raising funds for Detroit nonprofits.

“We’re having a carnival to raise money for a homeless shelter,” White says, “and through the carnival, students studied modeling systems in math class to better understand how much to charge in order to make money to donate.”

The design process corrals various disciplines and individuals around a central problem, requiring both technical and interpersonal skills. “We teach our students how to work in groups, how to empathize, how to prototype,” White says, “and these are skills you don’t often have in schools.”

Especially public schools. But that is beginning to change. HFA isn’t the only urban public school exposing students to the potential of design. There are well-established programs like the Charter High School for Architecture and Design in Philadelphia and Miami’s Design Architecture Senior High, and newcomers like the Baltimore School for Design, a newly launched public middle and high school with a focus on architecture, graphic design, and fashion.

What is also unique about these design-based schools is their emphasis on place. The city becomes a classroom and the students become empowered to see their role in the bigger picture. They learn to ask questions, to seek answers, and to believe that they may become agents of change. They learn to understand the significance of place.

As Alain de Botton writes in his book The Architecture of Happiness: “Belief in the significance of architecture is premised on the notion that we are, for better or worse, different people in different places — and on the conviction that it is architecture’s task to render vivid to us who we might ideally be.”

As I write this piece, the inaugural class of the Baltimore Design School starts their spring term, and another debate rages in the city. Protesters have been marching on the site of a proposed  $104 million, 120-unit youth jail in East Baltimore. This significant capital investment comes as budgets for city schools and recreation centers have been decimated. Protestors’ signs read: “Schools Not Jails.”

Fundamental to the dialogue on human-centered design and the protests in Baltimore is a simple fact: What we build matters. Buildings are our culture writ large. They embody our intentions and speak, in brick and mortar, for who we are. Grow up in a community devoid of quality schools and recreation centers but flush in prisons, and what does that say about our collective intentions? How can those kids become who they might ideally be? What we build in cities matters. And who builds those cities also matters.

White is clear on her aspirations for her students. She wants them to succeed, to seek higher education, and then she hopes they might return home. “Our design challenges help students to understand real problems and to bring skills back to their neighborhood,” White says. “We are helping students see that they can go onto college and come back and help the city of Detroit prosper.”

Designer Will Phillips (pictured) and John Bolster have opened Sandtown Millworks in a former bank with help from a Operation:Storefront grant.Photo: Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson

This year, small businesses across the country are harnessing the spirit of the Occupy movement in the hopes of reclaiming the spirit of the holiday season. If you plan to shop, they say, buy local, buy independent, support your community. Their mantra: Re-Occupy Main Street.

Thing is, cities like Baltimore, where I live, don’t have as many “Main Street” stores to occupy these days. Sixty years ago, my grandmother could take the bus downtown to Howard Street, walk from shop to shop, and cross everyone off her list. Today, Howard Street is more vacancy than vibrancy. Most of the street-level real estate is boarded up or abandoned.

A new grant program called Operation:Storefront aims to change that. The nonprofit Downtown Partnership of Baltimore launched the initiative last year with the goals of helping entrepreneurs and artists find affordable storefront space and generating more foot traffic downtown.

I first learned about this from my brother, who works at the partnership. He told me that the group wanted to help the community get back to the Jane Jacobs ideal of the mixed-use, downtown retail neighborhood, so it issued a request for proposals last fall and entertained all types of ideas.

“Individuals, artists, existing groups that wanted a second location, or a start up — we looked at all proposals,” says Mackenzie Paull, the partnership’s retail and economic development manager and the person in charge of Operation:Storefront. “The only critical component for us was that it engage people as they go by or bring people downtown to the site.”

The Sandtown Millworks storefront is located in a former bank in downtown Baltimore.Photo: Elizabeth Evitts DickinsonTwelve individuals and businesses — ranging from artists and performance groups to a barbershop, a fashion designer, and a design center — were awarded up to $10,000 to occupy a physical location downtown. Paull helped broker deals with landlords for street-level space varying in size from 600 to 8,000 square feet, and with leases ranging from two months to three years. The Downtown Partnership also gave grantees business advice on how to scale their ideas to a physical space. The program not only fills empty storefronts, enlivening the street, it also allows people to incubate an idea on a short-term basis with the goal of building a business long-term.

Sandtown Millworks is one of the small businesses benefiting from a Storefront grant. Founded in November of last year by designers Will Phillips and John Bolster, the company salvages wood from the demolition of Baltimore rowhouses and transforms it into furniture. “Most of the city of Baltimore was built with this old growth lumber that you can’t buy anymore,” Phillips says. “It was cut from trees that were 100 to 200 years old, so it’s dense and has a beautiful wood grain.”

Phillips and Bolster started hauling the wood to a warehouse shop in South Baltimore, taking not only the large and lengthy floorboards, but also the joists, the studs, the roof boards, and the lathe — those thin strips that help hold plaster on the wall and frequently end up in the junk pile of a demo. There they built a furniture line that celebrates the source of the wood, highlighting old nail holes and saw marks. They even use scrap metal from another local craftsman for a unique lag bolt to hold tabletops in place.

Sandtown Millworks could be the business model of the Re-Occupy movement: They take something that has lost its commercial value and, through hard work and skill, convert it into a beautiful and useful product. They build relationships with local craftsmen, like the metalworker, and they market their work to the masses from a stall at the Sunday farmers market. Thanks to Storefront, they now have a showroom in a former bank where potential customers can peruse furniture in a beautiful space with vaulted ceilings and marble floors.

Sandtown Millworks makes tables from old growth lumber salvaged from demolished rowhouses. The new showroom has netted two to three commissioned pieces a week.Photo: Elizabeth Evitts DickinsonThat Phillips and Bolster sell the furniture from the shell of a former bank seems a fitting tribute to the spirit of this endeavor. It’s a new kind of commodity, one based in human interaction, community investment, and upcycling.

“We take old wood people have discarded and make it something beautiful,” Phillips says. “It’s the same thing Operation:Storefront does — taking these old spaces and polishing them up and breathing some life back into them.”

Baltimore isn’t the only city doing this. Paull was inspired by a similar concept in Connecticut called Project Storefronts New Haven. The New Haven project has a bit of a different structure, according to Executive Director Margaret Bodell. Bodell lines up landlords in downtrodden neighborhoods who are willing to offer free rent for 90 days. She then matches the space with a business, which gets $500 to help build out the store as well as support with marketing and business strategy.

Since the project’s inception two years ago, Bodell says more than 30 entrepreneurs have tested business models, generating over $100,000, and foot traffic in the neighborhood where the stores are located has seen a marked increase. The first business to open — a co-working incubator space — was so successful that the owners ended up renting more square footage and signing a five-year lease. Perhaps just as important, the merchants in the program have galvanized the community through new events and activities.

The storefronts idea helps small business gain footing while helping landlords see the value in taking a chance on someone they may have considered too risky. It’s one better than the transient pop up shop model, Bodell says, where a business briefly occupies a space to sell goods, knowing that it will close shop. “The pop up is a flash in the pan and then it’s gone. We want people to pop in and stay there.”