Site and Environmental Systems Planning (11.304J)
The Site Planning class is the oldest, continuously taught course in the School of Architecture + Planning at MIT. Since its first offering in 1935 it was taught by only a handful of instructors including Kevin Lynch, Donald Appleyard, Tunney Lee and Gary Hack. In 1956 Kevin Lynch took what was seen as a mainstream course in site engineering and turned it into a whole–system approach to planning the built and natural environments. Since 2000, under the direction of Eran Ben-Joseph, and later on Mary Anne Ocampo the class has incorporated hands-on, client-based projects dealing with an array of prevailing environmental and site systems planning issues. These include: hurricane devastated areas in Biloxi, MS the retrofitting of housing developments in Tama, Japan and the transformation of contaminated waterfront sites in Bronx, NY.
