Mid-size urbanism

To speak of the project for the mid-size city is to speculate about the possibility of mid-size urbanity as a design category. An urbanism not necessarily defined by the scale of the intervention or the size of the city undergoing transformation, but by the framing of the issues at hand and the relationships it involves. Using four examples, this article outlines the contours of an emerging practice in which this notion of mid-size urbanism is expressed. Projects that alternately manifest themselves on urban, regional of even metropolitan scales, but that display a specifically ‘mid-size urban’ interest in their treatment of the territory. A recurring theme in the plans is a focused attention on the selective and eccentric character of mid-size urbanity and the adoption of these qualities as premises for designing new forms of territorial cohesion.