Designing for Social and Urban Integration: Rosario New Alberdi

This studio will explore issues pertaining to the urbanization of vulnerable places of the global south and will propose planning, landscape and urban design strategies in the pursuit of its equitable development. We will focus on Argentina, where despite recent legislation that secures land tenure for residents of informal settlements, a recurrent lack of city rights remains as the primary condition of these neighborhoods.

Our studio will work on a challenging urbanization process located on the city of Rosario: the New Alberdi Popular Neighborhood, whose patterns of social and economic disparity showcase modes of political engagement and economic deployment similar to those prevalent in peripheries of big cities of the global south. Organized neighbors, planning agencies, public officers, and real state developers have ideas for the site, but despite all intentions, Nuevo Alberdi still wait for the design strategies that could trigger its development.

We will travel to Rosario, visit Nuevo Alberdi neighborhood and hear from residents and other relevant actors. Working around political frictions, environmental threats, and patterns of socio-spatial inequality, our studio will explore the diagrammatic and synthetic agency of design to bring forth an imagination of a shared urban future for the site.

As current regulation envisions the area structured around super-blocks, we will search for innovative block and housing typologies in a newly imagined urban grid. As the site includes the last functioning dairy farm on city limits, urban food production tied to affordable housing will be explored. And as the site is located in a flood-prone area, we will look for innovative landscape infrastructures to work as resilient ecological and productive buffer zones.

We will conduct a design laboratory for landscape infrastructures, planning frameworks and urban design strategies. By the end of this course, students will have developed abilities to pursue urban spatial analysis and to incorporate information from the political, social, economic, and cultural contexts to effectively craft progressive urban design agendas.

The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 3rd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Tuesday, the first meeting of this course will be on Thursday, September 5th. It will meet regularly thereafter.