Urban Planning Theory and Praxis: Comparative-Historical Origins and Applications
This course takes as its point of departure the historical and national origins of planning as a discipline, assesses its evolution over time and across developmental contexts, and situates our understanding of what has come to constitute “planning theory” in a deeper understanding of the political, economic, and social specificities and constraints on planning action. In understanding what might be referred to as planning praxis, we not only examine those social structures and economic as well as political power relations that enable or constrain preference for certain policies and processes of decision-making. We also examine the history of ideas about cities, debates over how the built environment should be designed and/or governed, and address longstanding conflicts over who should have the legitimacy or authority to undertake such decisions. The time span that we examine during this course begins in the late-19th and early 20th century and ends in the contemporary era.
Upon completion of this course, students will understand the main theoretical and praxis traditions that underpin contemporary approaches to urban planning, especially in the US and Europe, but also in global-comparative perspective. They will be able to relate contemporary theoretical and praxis traditions to earlier rounds of debate and political struggle regarding urbanization as well as the attempt to plan, manage and modify its socio-spatial expressions and ecological consequences. In the process, they will understand the historical connections between the disciplines of architecture, urban design, landscape architecture, and urban planning.
Additionally, students will be well equipped to assess the underlying normative, conceptual and political assumptions that mediate major contemporary approaches to urban planning and policy, globally and locally. This will entail becoming acquainted with social science approaches to the study of cities and urbanization and relating those approaches to the study of planning and design strategies across contexts and scales. Finally, students will be in a position to assess planning discourses—for instance, regarding social and spatial justice, equity, diversity, and sustainability—and will be able to relate them to ongoing social struggles to imagine and create alternative urban worlds. In the most general sense, this course will help students build critical capacities for understanding and contributing to efforts to shape and reshape urban life through the planning, design, and policy disciplines.
Histories and Theories of Urban Form and Design
This course provides an introduction to the critical histories and theories of urban intervention and formation, and to the disciplinary practices of urban design in relation to planning and the broader technological, institutional, economic, social and political contexts in which they operate over time and across cultures and geographies. Beginning in the mid 19th century, the course uses historical and theoretical readings and case studies of specific projects (built and unbuilt) to ground theoretical ideas, modes and models of practice in the material and discursive contexts in which those ideas and practices have emerged and operated since the beginning of captialist urbanization to the present day. The emphasis is on plural histories and plural readings of the processes of urban formation through multiple theoretical and critical lenses. We will focus on key episodes of transformation and paradigm-shift that allow us to explore a range of critical frameworks and methodologies for understanding emerging conditions of the contemporary urban historically, theoretically, and spatially across scales, and to situate the processes, debates, and projects that have shaped urban environments in larger discourses that foreground issues of social equity and identity, power, privilege, race, and gender. It connects the historical narrative to contemporary transformations and to the challenges presented by emergent urban problems, crises, and struggles across places, territories and scales.
Topics include: industrialization and capitalist urbanization: regulating the capitalist city; Garden City; Planned Metropolis; Parks Movement and City Beautiful; the Modernist City; Chicago School; the racialization of space, exclusionary zoning, redlining + suburbanization; regionalism; the Socialist City; CIAM in Europe, Asia, North Africa, and Latin America; urban renewal, Civil Rights and the struggle for the city; advocacy planning + design in the US; the emergence of urban design as bridge-practice; postindustrial city; privatization, market rationalism + the withdrawal of the state; critiques of modernist urbanism; the semantic dimension of urban form + space; typomorphology + collage; landscape + ecological methodologies; preservation + alteration; New Urbanism; justice planning; the contradictions of informality; seeing from the South; design and planning for climate change; reparative planning and design.
First year Urban Design students have prioritized early enrollment in 4151 and 4496. The Histories and Theories of Urban Design lottery (HTUD lottery) will open on Tuesday, January 10 at 9 AM and close on Friday, January 13, at 9 AM. First Year UD students must submit selections by the deadline to ensure enrollment via this lottery.
Urban Grids-3:Grid Plan versus Big Project
Within a larger research scope of exploring open forms for city design, this seminar will focus on a clear discussion of two paradigms:
1) Large scale plans that take the urban grid as the main layout, allowing many forms of development. We know that Manhattan is the result of a decision to establish a well-tempered urban grid over the whole island in 1811, framing all the different subsequent morphologies and transformations.
2) The big projects behind the initiatives of major events like World Expos that have to meet a precise program for a short period of time. Paris held seven different Expos along the Seine and created a cultural downtown district for the metropolis with parks, museums and mixed uses.
The two design strategies respond to the different logics, time constraints and social ambitions of the urban projects. This seminar is a distillation of a twofold research process at the GSD. The first is the Urban Grids: Handbook for Regular City Design presented at previous editions. The second is ongoing research on the “Urbanistic impact of World Expositions in cities” that summarizes some lessons to be learned from the experience of the more than 100 expos held since 1851 in London, covering cities in different continents and the most varied of cultures. Both paradigms are good examples of open forms for designing the city. Each responds to different urbanistic aims. The first is responsible for many expansions with the different characters we’ll discover as we study them, but they are, in general, lasting urban sectors. The second initially has something of the ephemeral about it as in many cases the programs are limited to a few months, but the transformation nevertheless produces special districts in most of the Expo cities that go on to induce other types of developments. The ultimate aim of the course is to create a new understanding of the way we approach city design by means of powerful models and innovative experiences that can rigorously inform our design decisions. Revisiting these two paradigms—that have channeled so many different objectives—with a critical viewpoint may help us to address new issues when approaching the urban future with its new social challenges and sustainable requirements.
The research seminar will specifically focus on the following steps:
A) Reviewing the conceptual framework of plans and projects. Understanding certain categories such as known vs unknown, systematic vs specific, and generic vs ad hoc. We will identify the nature of each paradigm.
B) Researching seminal projects (city fragments) that suggest new design patterns in both paradigms. Study of quantitative features in order to understand qualitative values in the design and its development.
C) Comparative studies of the various aspects of investigation to establish both individual research areas and a collective agenda for the group.
D) The final outcome will present the students’ individual critical views in relation to the values of each of the paradigms for future application, within the new environmental challenges we are facing today.
Course Format and Method:
Some introductory reading will be provided at the beginning of the course. After the initial steps, the seminar will go on to explore the topics, primarily by means of analytical and operative drawings that allow students to produce critical arguments about values and priorities using some relevant cases for both urban design paradigms.
***Please note that the material circulated during the seminar is for use in the seminar only.
The History of Heritage and the Heritage of History
This is a seminar course designed for design students who are interested in understanding the cultural background behind heritage theories, conservation practices, and related socio-cultural issues in a variety of geographical contexts. The course will be divided into three parts: the history of heritage conservation, the politics of heritage conservation, and how and for whom heritage conservation practices shape our world spatially and socially. It encourages students to question the essentialist understandings of our inherited space and to read the characters of space from a dynamic perspective. Students will learn to critically analyze the cultural meaning and identity of a place by identifying cultural groups and their social/cultural frames and to understand how ideas about the past are used and misused to create the present.
Heritage has many identities. It began as a testament to authoritative history buttressing the legitimacy of the nation-state from the 19th century. But more recently it has become as aspect of popular culture promoting a neo-liberal commodity society. Heritage occupies a contested position in the built environment both spatially and socially because of its capriciousness in constructing historical and cultural meanings and social identities. “The past is everywhere,” says David Lowenthal, and as a consequence, everything humans inhabit is potentially susceptible to becoming heritage. Against this backdrop, heritage conservation starts to break away from its original meaning of inherited familial property to a much broader definition of sustaining national historical and cultural tradition, in the name of solidarity or national revival or simply community control of its “turf” against outsiders or change. However, “heritage” is a construct, often widely divergent from actual history, thus is never inherently beneficial or neutral. It carries different and sometimes incompatible meanings embedded in historical interpretations, identity politics, and social conflicts among various interest groups. These meanings are selectively constructed by dominant groups and reinforced by power.
In this class, student participation will include a weekly one-page synthesis on required readings, presentations on case studies, and a final project. The class will meet weekly for the instructor’s lecture and discussions on readings and case studies for up to 3 hours. This seminar is open to all GSD students, and there is no prerequisite for this seminar.
Urban Design & Planning for Climate Transformation, Intense Migration, & Rapid Urban Growth
We face a vulnerable future due to the accelerated intensity of natural and humanitarian disasters. The resultant scale of unprecedented migration has been coupled with a lack of infrastructures to accommodate the climatic displacement giving rise to new and more complex forms of vulnerability. While current estimates account for 250 million international migrants, predictions indicate that by 2050 this number will increase to 350 million of which 60% will have been displaced due to environmental factors. These climate crises accentuate inequalities as the most vulnerable groups resort to informal settlements in areas with the greatest exposure to effects of environmental hazards. In short, the landscape of informality will soon be a direct reflection of the effects of climate change and its intensified migration.
Latin America exemplifies this twofold transition as approximately one third of its urban dwellers live in informal settlements. The global scenario finds Latin-America and the Caribbean at a moment of extreme transitions. It is expected that in incoming years uneven urban growth of the region, climatic fragility, political conflict, and other migratory drivers will set up the stage for massive human displacement, which will translate into aspirational and forced migration at an unprecedented scale. A more vulnerable migration landscape will increase the demands for rapid response settlements, bringing a new set of challenges to destination cities.
Even though the Paris Agreement and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development were agreed upon between countries, to ensure effectiveness of its ambitious climate targets, there is a need to accelerate the implementation of these global agenda at the scale of a city and include the climate adaptation of precarious settlements at its center. Realizing the agency of local governments over about one-third of the potential for urban climate change mitigation in the region, the class will develop recommendations to move towards the localization of NDCs in cities and improve capacities for multi-level climate governance at a local context. We will focus on the capacity of designers in dialogue with subnational governments and mayors to be agents of change and demonstrate that deeper greenhouse gas emission cuts and equitable resilience building are not only possible but achievable, by unfolding the full potential of design imagination and thereby inspiring the intergovernmental relations to improve in the governance and coordination and vertical integration of their ambitious goals.
If architecture, urban design, and planning do not come up with transitional strategies and find agile strategic responses, it is highly likely that precarious settlements will suffer deeply the effects of climate change and absorb a major part of the migrant influx. In the near future urban robustness will be increasingly related to the ability of cities to structure their systems as open, recombinant, and capable of withstanding varying levels of requirements through constant reconfigurations. In this seminar we will research about flexible solutions to temporary problems, imagining the physical form of cities in a more elastic condition, and discussing about reversible configurations that are able to articulate more sustainable forms of urban development. Indeed, when in the future, other deep transitions will also become prominent, a softer, weaker, and adjustable urban form will be the only fertile ground for conflict resolution. As part of the class, we will host prominent practitioners, regional policy leaders and influential intellectuals as guests to discuss strategies that governments, cities, and designers can apply in this imminent scenario. Assignments include leading and participating in discussion sessions and a final paper.
Discourse and Research Methods
This pro-seminar is a core requirement for successful completion of the Doctor of Design program. Primarily, it will focus on various thematic areas that range across various topics and the methods and skills that might be involved in each area. Generally, these will include: historical thinking, critical thinking, thinking about technologies, analysis of social settings, theorizing landscapes, and theorizing aspects of urban form, as well as analyzing its environmental performance. Each seminar will be of two or more hours in duration and comprised of presentation by an invited faculty member on a theme of their research and scholarly interest, followed by discussion among the class. The seminar will meet on Thursdays between 3:00pm and 5:45pm at 20 Sumner Road, House Zero’s lower floor conference room.
Discourse and Methods I
This course is open only to Ph.D. students in Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning and Design (Ph.D. students from other departments may participate with instructor’s permission). This year’s course focuses on major theoretical and historiographical issues and themes that still structure scholarly discourse today. Students will confront these issues and themes by relating them to key methodological concerns and horizons in their own emerging research agendas.
Thesis in Satisfaction of Degree Doctor of Design
Thesis in Satisfaction of the degree Doctor of Design.
Independent Thesis for the Degree Master in Design Studies
(Previously "Open Projects”) Prerequisites: Filing of signed "Declaration of Advisor" form with MDes office, and approval signature of the program director. A student who selects this independent thesis for the degree MDes pursues independent research of relevance to the selected course of study within the MDes program, under the direction of a Design School faculty member. Only stuents in the MDES Areas, not Domains, can enroll in this course, and with the noted approvals.
Independent Thesis in Satisfaction of the Degree MAUD, MLAUD, or MUP
Following participation in the department’s fall thesis preparation seminar (GSD 9204), the spring term of the second year sees students complete, defend, and submit their thesis. Thesis students must register in GSD 9302: Independent Thesis, which counts for eight units. This is a critical period in the thesis process and one where a strong student-advisor relationship is essential. During the term, students work closely with their advisors to develop a final thesis that can pass the scrutiny of faculty and outside critics. Students present their thesis-in-progress in mid-term and pre-final reviews and defend the final project in a final review.