This landscape architecture studio looked at ways of taking advantage of the ecological potentials of vacant land within Youngstown, Ohio, a shrinking mid-sized city, and to catalyze new uses and investments within the city. Its secondary goal was to establish a more optimistic view of the conditions surrounding shrinking, post-industrial cities in the search for new urban landscape possibilities. The studio was broken into two segments. Each segment had several sites within the city to look to and student chose one of these sites to explore for each segments. The sites were chosen after long discussions with stakeholders and planners within the city to in an effort to identify the most influential areas for design input. The first segment had sites chosen with the help of the Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative (MVOC). The second segment of the work focused on projects chosen by the Mahoning River Corridor Initiative (MRCI).