New York Urban Expeditions

This course is a workshop-type seminar that provides a critical and practical frame for the analyses and representation of the Urban Environment. It will explore current methods of urban representation as means to understand and analyze the city and, ultimately, to develop generative tools that will allow students to address and incorporate the urban scale to their design projects. By putting these methods of representation into perspective, the course will argue that many of these techniques, in fact, are timeless and universal, but oftentimes they are specific to the time when they were popularized, and relate to the building production and ideas that they represent. The topics are approached through a series of different techniques, resource databases, and software programs. The course takes New York as the testing ground for reading and analyzing the urban fabric. Lectures, readings and site visits will allow the student to familiarize with the subject. Using New York as a Laboratory, and taking as a base the ‘Geographical Expeditions’ a pedagogical methodology developed during the 1960s and 1970s by Radical Geographers (such as William Bunge) that explored ways in which planners would go back to field work and to produce maps and research documents of their urban environment by surveying local communities’ claims for social justice, students will produce a series of analytical documents, working first in groups with a large area (Cluster) of Upper Manhattan, moving then to individual work analyzing a specific site within their assigned area. Weekly assignments consist of the step-by-step completion of a three-parts assignment: Layering the City / Recording the City / Proposing the City. The work will be presented weekly to the course Professor. Students will work on a series of Layered Drawings, in groups, a 2-minutes video of their site, and a free format Site Report, individually. The class will be supported by a series of lectures on the topics, to be held at the beginning and half-way through each of the three-parts, and required readings to be discussed interspersed with the lectures, with content that will give students a critical approach to urban theories and models, and provide guidance and examples to work on their assignments.