Informal Urbanisms: Incrementalism and Citizen Participation in the Built Environment

This seminar excavates a series of episodes in the complex history of architecture and planning’s encounter with conditions of extreme poverty. Case studies and discussions reframe the history of citizen participation in design and planning projects intended to address such conditions. The course familiarizes students with a variety of historical perspectives on activating the agency of end-users in efforts to address these conditions and interrogates how such specific projects constrain, empower, and influence design and planning strategies more generally for disinvested communities. Students also explore vanguard techniques to present and display complex, archival research projects on these topics.