Disaster Field Lab

GSD 5343 will challenge its participants to develop design strategies in the face of great human suffering, political instability, high development pressure and coordination quagmires after a major disaster. It will use the case of Port-au-Prince in Haiti as an overfunded catastrophe with little results to show after almost two years of stalemate. Participants will have to embed anticipatory and remedial factors in their reconstruction thinking, while they have to decide on priorities of action, scale and sector. Project proposals can range from the development of a new incremental housing type or the definition of new working relationships between agencies as long as they can be justified in a clear rationale of importance. That way GSD 5343 is as much a class about orientation skills under extreme hardship as it is about the development of concrete chains of action.

GSD 5343 is a required class for MDes students with the focus Anticipatory Spatial Practices.