This course is an introductory methods seminar in which students will become familiar with the idea of method itself and learn how to translate and apply a range of introduced methods in support of a design argument. The emphasis of this course is less on mastering the technical execution of methods than on understanding how methods operate conceptually and how they can be mobilized analytically within students’ own work, drawing on their own intellectual and representational strengths.

The course approaches analytical methods as the production of distinct ways of knowing the city, and asks how those epistemological commitments shape the urban forms designers ultimately imagine and produce. Methods, in this sense, are not simply descriptive tools for recording existing conditions, but operative frameworks that organize what can be seen, interpreted, and projected. A figure-ground drawing of Rome and a cluster analysis of the same city do not merely generate different representations; they produce different conceptions of what the city is.

The methods presented in this course are organized around a dialogue between two broad traditions of spatial thought. The first understands the city as an object that can be decomposed, classified, measured, and rationally ordered. This tradition is associated with figure-ground analysis, typomorphology, zoning, land-use classification, master planning, and other methods that seek legibility through more obsolete forms of analytical decomposition. The second understands the city as a dynamic process: a field of relations, flows, adaptations, and emergent patterns. This tradition draws from ecology, systems theory, complexity science, self-organization, urban metabolism, network analysis, scene theory, and digital modeling. Rather than treating these traditions as opposites, the course asks how each methods reveals different dimensions of urban life and how their tensions can expand the agency of urban design and planning

Through lectures, readings, case studies, and analytical exercises, students will be introduced to multiple ways of reading the city: as form, surface, movement, infrastructure, ecology, regulation, image, consumption, metabolism, network, and data. Historical and contemporary cases will include Rome, Vienna, Beijing, Seoul, Tokyo, Chicago, Las Vegas, Boston, Marrakech, New York, Copenhagen, Los Angeles, Singapore, and other urban contexts.

Each weekly session proceeds in two parts. The first is a lecture component, divided into two sections. The first introduces the methodological category and its underlying epistemological commitments, while the second examines how that method has been operationalized through the week’s case studies, showing how different methodological approaches can generate distinct readings of cities and, in turn, different design possibilities. The second part of the session takes the form of a seminar discussion, in which students critically interrogate the method’s assumptions, limitations, and relationship to the methods introduced in previous weeks.

There are no prerequisites for this course. It is especially encouraged for students who are considering undertaking a thesis.