Thinking Landscape-Making Cities – Designing Regenerative Futures

This design seminar challenges you to assess existing and anticipated climate change threats for a city of your choice and create an image, plan, and narrative for mid-century and beyond. The city you choose may be your home city, a city facing multiple climate change challenges, or a city you are working with in another course.

In cities and metropolitan areas, temperatures are anticipated to become dangerously hot and coastlines and urban harbors will have to be restructured to cope with sea-level rise and more powerful storms. The spatial pattern of buildings and open spaces will be confronted with monsoon-type downpours perhaps alternating with months without rain. Thus, over the next 30 years, urban and regional spatial structure will change, sometimes dramatically. In this design seminar, you will project scenarios that imagine new spatial patterns and their corresponding social, political, and economic attributes. What are your ideas for a just, temperate, and regenerative future?

At the GSD, as designers and researchers, we are responsible for putting forward plans, policy concepts, and visual images that describe future alternatives and how design in the broadest sense can engage what seem to be insurmountable threats. The projects you develop will be not merely resilient but regenerative, they will support and build the capacity of all living and mineral systems.

Students working in both teams and as individuals, will develop materials to support an intention, concept, proposition, scenario, and images supported by diagrams, maps, plans, and precise texts. As a basis of our readings, discussion, and your project work, we will focus on four input areas: Water, Infrastructure, Pattern, and Narrative.

In Part 1, two Introduction meetings will establish the propositions of the course and the interests and questions of the students. In Part 2, 4 student teams will lead presentation and workshops on the foundational themes of Water, Infrastructure, Pattern, and Narrative. Water includes the blue-green structure of the city, especially the watershed and urban canopy. Infrastructure consists of energy and transportation as well as the metabolic flows of material and nutrients. Pattern will describe new spatial form and corresponding social and political structure. Finally, Narrative will describe the everyday life in terms of place and experience. During Part 2, supported by the discussions and materials of the Foundation workshops, students will develop an individual project. In Part 3, Focus and Scenario, you will consider your individual project in micro and macro scales to further develop your concepts and strategies for your chosen city, region, and community. In Part 4, Presentation and Communication, we will focus over three weeks on the art of effective communication and presentation.

The seminar is open to all students at the GSD. It offers urban design skills for landscape architects, and urban and landscape design thinking and skills for architects. For urban designers, it will offer landscape ecology strategies, and for city planners it will offer an opportunity to invent policy and future forms of representation. Prospective students without a design background may apply.

You will look beyond today’s adaptive solutions to imagine future scenarios. Working as individuals and teams, the collaborative and supportive experience of the class will nurture the confidence to experiment.