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Margaret Crawford Professor Department of Urban Planning and Design |
Courses
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Listening to
the City This course addresses one of the central contradictions currently facing architects, planners, landscape architects, and urban designers who want to practice in the city. On the one hand, it has been widely acknowledged that the city is unknowable. Its multiplicity of actors and perspectives, historical layers, and accretion of visible and invisible actions defy singular modes of interpretation. On the other hand, it often becomes necessary to intervene in this complex and contested environment, engaging with a city’s social, physical, or cultural dimensions. In order to deal with this challenging situation, students adopt a series of different roles, attitudes, and methods to investigate widely divergent aspects of a single city. The goal is twofold: first, to learn a generally useful methodology and, second, to accumulate enough located knowledge to reach a provisional understanding of a particular place. Achieving this involves theoretical readings, empirical research, and fieldwork. Histories and Theories of Urban Interventions
Beginning with the mid 19th century city, this course surveys a broad range of urban interventions. These include transportation and infrastructural engineering, settlement houses, landscape design, and real estate development, among others. Urban planning and urban design are situated with them as part of a larger discourse about the problems and possibilities of urban life. American and European examples are used as case studies demonstrating the complex mix of social, cultural, political and economic factors that shape urban processes and the built environment. Topics include the industrial city, utopian towns, the inner city, decentralization and suburbs, the metropolis, housing, urban renewal and edge cities. Reality Check: Implementing Ideas in the Real World This research seminar investigates the critical gap between concept and realization. How do ideas, proposals, and projects actually get implemented? As a case study we use the city of Chelsea, MA where the class "Listening to the City" has been working for the past four years. The smallest city in the state, Chelsea offers a managable site to explore the complex interactions between private and public, different levels of government, organized and unorganized groups of residents, and adjoining municipalities. The course requires both analysis and creativity, as students develop new strategies to inform, communicate, publicize, interact, and encourage these groups to realize specific design projects. Thinking the Low This urban theory course examines a diverse body of social, literary and cultural theory in order to assemble a set of concepts that can be used to understand, analyze, and utilize the social and cultural category of the "low." This category includes popular culture, folk culture and cultures of the working class, poor and marginal social groups. Readings include works by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, anthropologists Mary Douglas, Michel deCerteau and James Holston, literary critics Mikhail Bakhtin, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White and cultural critics Dick Hebdidge, Susan Stewart and Constance Penley, We examine economic, social, political, cultural, esthetic and spatial practices. Rather than emphasize simple hierarchy inversion (i.e. the low is good; the high is bad), we focus on zones of interaction between the two realms such as the ideas of symbolic inversion and transgression used by Stallybrass and White and Homi Bhaba's notion of hybridity. The goal of the class is to use these concepts to illuminate urban phenomena that might otherwise resist interpretation. Although the bulk of the class is devoted to reading and discussion, students are expected to develop a research or design project to which this mode of analysis can be applied. The Culture and Politics of the Built
Environment in the U.S. Yearlong research seminar in conjunction with the Charles Warren Center workshop of scholars working in the field. Scholars work on research projects that examine the architecture and landscape in the United States from the Eighteenth through the Twentieth Centuries. The seminar investigates the evolution of building, landscapes, and urban forms. Emphasis is placed on investigations that connect the built environment with American attitudes and actions toward public and private life, cities and open space, government provision and private markets, and modernism and “national heritage.” Students attend the Center's bimonthly workshop and undertake their own research paper related to the theme of the seminar. The Culture of Cities During the 19th century, as dramatic urban transformations rendered many European and American cities nearly unrecognizable, a new urban discourse emerged. Urban critics struggled to understand the nature of this altered environment and to analyze the unique qualities of urban life. This seminar addresses this literature historically and thematically, reading a selection of key texts ranging from Engel’s description of Manchester to Simmel’s essay, "The Metropolis and Mental Life," and from Lewis Mumford’s idealistic conceptualization of the city to the Situationist International and Jane Jacob’s biting critiques of modernist urbanism. Temporary Urbanism Freaknik in Atlanta, the Union Square Greenmarket in Manhattan, Critical Mass in San Francisco, Burning Man in Nevada, riots, demonstrations, parades, and festivals all over the United States. Illegal, sanctioned, or just tolerated, occurring once a year, once a week, or once in a lifetime, in a vacant lot or across the city, these events produce ephemeral but significant transformations in urban life and urban space. This class explores both the manifestations and the meanings of these temporary urbanisms. Using a range of theoretical approaches and different types of empirical research, we document and interpret a selected set of case studies, hoping to discover their implications for design and planning practice. Contemporary Urban
Dynamics Today in the United States, urbanization processes are multiple and contradictory. This course describes and analyzes a broad spectrum of emerging urban phenomena, ranging from master planned suburban communities to deserted inner cities, from tourist downtowns to mega-malls. Difficult to fit into existing taxonomies of urban/suburban, planned/unplanned, or even positive/negative, these places challenge our conventional understandings of urbanism. This course, organized as a reading seminar, maps their dynamics, linking them both with larger economic, political, and social changes and with new design approaches. Since this investigation necessarily draws on a variety of disciplines, types of information, and perspectives, another important focus is on understanding and evaluating different models of interpretation. After a series of introductory lectures and discussions of basic readings, students produce detailed case studies. |