LA223G-URBAN CONTEXTS:PLANNING AND DESIGN OF CITY LANDSCAPES

SPRING 2020 - Rhode Island SCHOOL OF DESIGN . GRADUATE LEVEL . TAUGHT WITH NADINE GERDTS AND NONDITA CORREA MEHROTRA . FACULTY

This course is a core component of RISD’s Landscape Architecture program designed to build skills in understanding urban contexts and the forces at work in the public realm of cities. Using the historic, contemporary, and future city as primary frames of reference, we will study how cities have been shaped by, and evolved through urban planning, policy, and design strategies, socio-economic pressures, cultural beliefs, and political forces. We will explore the contemporary implications of decisions made in decades and centuries past, the roles and perspectives of various actors involved in those decision-making processes, the future trajectories of these cities, and our responsibilities as designers and planners in shaping the future of the cities. Most urgently, we will be looking for ways to building a more resilient and livable future. Our explorations will ask questions such as: What does the urban landscape look like as shifting economies and immigration bring rapid growth to some cities and population shrinkage to others? What are cities doing to reduce carbon footprints and plan for resiliency and adaptability in light of climate change? Who has the “right to the city” and what does that mean in terms of access to wealth, knowledge and spatial mobility? How might we as designers and planner re-imagine more equitable and just cities? Our agenda will include finding how citizens, planners and designers grapple with common realities of contemporary urban life while comparing differing historical, cultural, economic and geographic contexts. 

By employing a range of historical and contemporary resources, graphic tools, and your own observation, we will analyze issues such as urban form, social inequality, environmental and technological flows, political power, social and spatial change, and the relationship between the built environment and human experience. Through these various lenses, the depth of your knowledge will grow in making critical observations about the cultural, environmental and political systems at work in cities. Furthermore, focusing on the experiential and material qualities of urban landscapes at multiple scales, we will investigate how people create and use the built environment towards various ends. More specifically, we will investigate the role landscape architects, architects, planners, political players and everyday urban dwellers play in shaping the places we inhabit.