Urban Theory + Design in Post Industrial Age

This course is an introduction to the historiographical, theoretical, critical, and formal vocabularies of postwar urbanism throughout Europe, the U.S., and beyond. The class is arranged thematically and, in a larger context, chronologically. Students discuss the deployment of new urban design strategies against the backdrop of rapidly proliferating discursive and technological advances. From modernization leading to urbanization, from suburban sprawl to New Urbanism, from techno-utopian Megastructures to participatory and informal urbanism, the course measures the merits of various paradigms (and their critiques) against one another to begin to understand the processes that provide the structures and infrastructures for the built environments across the globe. It builds toward the present with an aim to measure the ever-increasing influence of ecological paradigms of globalization on both theory and design.