Advanced Seminar in City Form: Designing for Multimodal Mobility

Advanced Seminar in City Form — Designing for Multimodal Mobility — invites a group of students to research and discuss themes about the form of cities in an attempt to relate formal theory, with empirical analysis and urban design. This fall’s seminar fill focus on multi-modal infrastructure design.

Multi-modal transportation infrastructure – train lines, seaports, automobile roads, bike lanes and sidewalks – are all essential to contemporary cities for both connecting urban inhabitants to networks beyond their towns — nationally and internationally — while simultaneously providing a high-degree of accessibility at the local scale. Yet the presence of transportation infrastructure often introduces urban elements of a scale and grain that conflict with pedestrian accessible environments – they tend to splinter surrounding districts, create high traffic volumes on nearby streets, and require pedestrians to take large detours around the infrastructure. The seminar will explore how “big” transportation infrastructure can seamlessly co-exist with a “small” and pedestrian environments, desirably producing both highly walkable and highly efficient urban forms.

Participants will critically examine prior cases and work with a real-world study area at the Port of Tallinn, Estonia, to investigate scenarios for maximizing equitable, multi-modal accessibility (pedestrian, bicycle, tram, car, and ferry) in a complex, waterfront district. Case-study analyses and design scenarios will involve hands-on use of the Urban Network Analysis tools in Rhino3D.