Quick thought experiment: When you left your home (apartment, whatever) to go to work (school, whatever) this morning, what did you see? The walkway from your front door to the sidewalk? Were your neighbors’ cars still parallel parked on the one-way street? Do you follow the same path to get to the bus stop (subway stop, light rail shelter, shuttle stop, whatever)? Or are you fortunate enough to be able to walk or bike to work? If so, do you use the most direct route, or do you have a particular path that you feel is, well, more user-friendly?

The world right outside your front door is worth pondering only because sometimes what we see every day can become what we’re blind to through familiarity. Chances are, you live where you live for a variety of reasons: economic, social, cultural, etc. Perhaps you live where you live because it’s close to work (or school), or close to a way to get to school/work by public transportation, or is located in the ideal school district for your children, or provides the ideal home/work multiuse space. All the factors that went into that decision play into the other decisions you make: where you go to buy groceries and household supplies, where and how you go out socially, where and how you get around at night. These are all things we take into consideration, sometimes actively, sometimes as passively as reading an address and knowing what that block of that street is like in Baltimore.

Baltimore: Open City wants you to think about those issues too, only through a slightly different prism. The 2010-’11 installment of MICA’s Exhibition Development Seminar—the student-run and -curated class that has mounted creative, big-idea shows nearly each spring since 1997—looks at Baltimore through the prism of “openness,” a term used loosely here to examine the equality of socioeconomic access to what an urban environment can offer its residents. This year’s EDS class was led by urban planner Daniel D’Oca—MICA adjunct professor of urban history and theory, Harvard School of Design design critic in Urban Planning and Design—who is also a co-founder of Interboro, the New York consortium of architects, urban designers, and planners that has helped advocate for this idea of an “open city” (see: the 2009 mural project “The Open City Pops Up Where and When You Least Expect It”). Working in partnership with a scattering of local organizations and professionals (Historian in Residence Antero Pietila, the Citizens Planning and Housing Association, the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance-Jacob France Institute, design hybrids D:center Baltimore and Dale Glenwood Green of Green and Tice, Thomas L. Hollowak of the University of Baltimore’s Langsdale Library, and the Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Africana Studies’ East Baltimore Oral History Project), the 29 EDS students researched the local and national politics and economics behind Baltimore’s development history in an effort to understand the why and how of the way Baltimore is today.

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