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Intellectual Themes
Teaching and research in City Design and Development have encompassed
many different research topics and professional projects over the last
three decades; these have resulted in the constant updating of the
program’s activities and course offerings. The following themes are
currently engaging our students and faculty, cutting across areas of
study, subjects, and research:
Mediated
City
This
theme builds on work done by Kevin Lynch in the early years of the
program and focuses on how form and meaning are perceived and
communicated in the current city. At issue are the effects of advanced
information technology on contemporary culture, as well as the increasing
importance of narrative on the form and design of cities. Our work around
this theme seeks to understand how urban experience is shaped by the
preservation of culture, history and memory, by the development of new
kinds of “mediated” places and activities in the public
realm, and by an emerging emphasis on tourism and entertainment in
cities. We are also interested in the tools and technologies by which
changes in urban form and landscape can be visualized and understood.
This had led to a major research initiative in urban simulation, using
new kinds of tangible digital interfaces.
Transformation
of the Industrial
City
This
theme is concerned with the future of the large areas of 19th and 20th
century industrial land and infrastructure that have been left behind in
cities all over the world. Factories and warehouses, ports and
waterfronts, rail-lines and depots, mines and oil fields, are among an
international inventory of abandonment, all seeking temporary and
permanent re-use. Our inquiries around this theme hope to clarify new
design approaches to urban industrial transformation, involving elements
such as education, recreation, and cultural development as well as new
forms of housing and transportation.
Urban
Performance
The
quality of urban life and work is currently being challenged and shaped
by many forces such as demographic patterns (aging and disability, for
example), international economics (globalization and the demise of
distance), and environmental pressures (sustainability, resource
conservation). Our inquiries around this theme ask how cities can be
reshaped in the face of these forces; how design and construction
standards affect livability; what role citizens should play in
determining urban quality in a contemporary democracy; and how one
understands the form of the vast, poor urban areas of the world and the
enormous discrepancy between them and places of wealth.
Design
Paradigms
With
the re-evaluation/repudiation of modernism as the dominant perspective on
design, this theme takes to task the development of design paradigms
appropriate to contemporary urban circumstances both in the United States
and other parts of the globe. Our inquiries around this theme center on
the making of good streets and public places, the expression of private
and public environments in the city, the aesthetics of popular demand,
the reshaping of the form of low-density cities, and the role that design
can play in the changing peripheries of cities.
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