PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY College of the Arts

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1 PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY College of the Arts SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE SPRING 2017 ARCH 4/532 History and Theory of Urban Design Elective (4 credits) Alison and Peter Smithson, Team X, CIAM Grid, Professor: B.D Wortham-Galvin, Ph.D. Meets: Tuesdays 9:00-11:50 am Location: SH 250 Contact: Office Hrs: SH 211, Tues. 1-3pm, Course Description Introduction to the development of historical and contemporary urban design with parallel developments in architecture and urban planning. Theoretical models are related to current practices in the design of various sociopolitical, environmental and aesthetic urban contexts. Le Corbusier, Plan Obus in Algiers, Algeria, 1932 Course Objectives To introduce and survey historical forces that produced the contemporary city To advance theoretical frameworks within which urban design can be conducted To survey the products of urban design strategies through case study analysis Fredrick Olmstead, Central Park, New York City, 1857

2 Course Overview This course addresses the field of urban design, beginning with its origins in European modernist traditions and exploring its historical origins and twentieth-century evolution. Locating developments in urban design within contemporaneous social and political currents, the course highlights the role of institutions and the deployment of difference in the imagination and realization of new urban realities. The class is seminar-based and will meet once a week; attendance and engagement are expected at each class. Classes will typically be devoted to presentations followed by seminar discussion. Course assignments will include readings, reading reports and a research and writing project. The course outline is as follows: PART I: EMPIRE and COLONIAL CITIES: SPECTACLE and THE CONTROL OF DIFFERENCE Cities of Empire/Cities of Spectacle Presents a survey of post-1845 European capital cities as they shifted from pre-industrial to industrial economies including the relation of imperialism, manufacturing, commodities and spectacle. Special focus on: London, Manchester, Vienna and Paris with discussion of World Exhibitions. Colonial Cities Includes an overview of colonial urbanism highlighting moments and geographies when different urban traditions collide. Specific discussion of Orientalism as it played out in the architecture and urban design of French, British and Dutch colonies in modern-day Asia and North Africa. PART II: THE STATE, THE CITY and ITS NATURAL and ECONOMIC ORDERS Utopian Cities Presents a survey of ideal, or utopian, urban design approaches over the past two millennia with emphasis on the CIAM model for the modernist ideal city and its unfolding in several real-life contexts, including the case of Brasilia, Brazil. Cities of the New World/Nature and the City Survey of urban design in the United States focused on the relationship of urbanism and the environment, including discussions of environmental pollution as it relates to control of human and animal populations, biological metaphors associated with urban blight and the use of natural resources. PART III: URBAN DESIGN AS WE KNOW IT: SCALE, FORM and SOCIAL LIFE OF CITIES Return to the City: Neighborhood, Sidewalk and New Urbanisms of Place This topic will discuss the post-world War II shift in urban planning, especially critiques of top-down design and CIAM modernism emerging from figures like Kevin Lynch and Jane Jacobs. It will go on to survey contemporary urban design thinking focused on renewed interested in the potential of the urban and in the concept of placemaking. Return to the Global: Best Practices and the New Civilizing Mission A discussion of the effects of globalization on urban design practices, focusing on the institutional

3 and policy networks that currently circulate best practices to so-called developing nations around the world. This week we will visit narratives of Green Urbanism, Smart Cities and the democratic potentials of pedestrian and bike infrastructures. Readings There is no text for this course; readings will be available on the class D2L website. Those marked with an asterisk (*) are required for all students. Students will be divided into 2 groups and required to read either (A) or (B) each week. Readings may be subject to change throughout the term. Spring 2016 ARCH 4/532 Class Schedule Class activities are subject to change. Readings should be completed prior to that day s scheduled class; additional readings and assignments will be announced as class progresses 29 March 1 Introduction to Course and Overview of Class Topics Discussion of the origins and meaning of Urban Design in relation to the fields of architecture and urban planning. Introduction of key interests and organizing themes of the course. Brief Preview of Contemporary Urban Design including the Highline/Bikeshare/TODs/Green Urbanism as new Infrastructures of Economic Development as well as best practices in the so-called developing world: the spectacle of Medellin and the greening of the global south. Intro to urban design s origins with special focus in its codification by CIAM and Harvard GSD. Brief survey of precedents for modern urban design from medieval urbanism in Europe and the Middle East to Renaissance design and architecture. Recommended Readings: Spiro Kostof, What is a City? in The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History (Boston, 1991): Eric Mumford, The Emergence of Urban Design in the Breakup of CIAM, in Krieger, Alex, and Saunders, William S., eds. Urban Design. Minneapolis, MN, USA: University of Minnesota Press, Accessed March 15, ProQuest ebrary: PART I EMPIRE + COLONIAL CITIES: SPECTACLE + THE CONTROL OF DIFFERENCE 05 April 2 Cities of Empire/Cities of Spectacle Survey of post-1845 European capital cities as they shifted from pre-industrial to industrial economies including their relation of imperialism, manufacturing, commodities and spectacle. Included: London, Vienna, Paris and includes discussion of World Exhibitions. Street as modern figures Spectacle, Dress, theatre and performance in the modern city Monuments in the City Connection between Empire and Empire city

4 **Sign up for Reading Summaries and Responses** Required Readings: * Edgar Allan Poe, The Man in the Crowd, in The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: The Modern Library, 1938): * Georg Simmel. The Metropolis and Mental Life in On Individuality and Social Forms Selected Writings (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971 [1903]): (A) Donald Olsen, The Vienna of Franz Joseph in The City as a Work of Art (Yale University Press, 1986): (B) Friedrich Engels, The Great Towns from The Conditions of the Working Class in England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958, orig. 1884): April 3 Case Study: Paris Capital of Modernity Discussion of the Haussemanization of Paris in the context of France s political climate of the time. Use of Baudelaire s Paris Spleen and Marxist reading of Paris s political and economic development. Seeing the Poor/Seeing and being seen in the City Creative destruction The Flâneur (blasé attitude) as Modern Figure Ground Rent and the original gentrification Required Readings: * Charles Baudelaire, The Eyes of the Poor, Paris Spleen, 1869: * Marshall Berman, The Family of Eyes and The Mire of the Macadam, in All That s Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982): (A) T.J. Clark, The View from Notre Dame, from The Painting of Modern Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984): (B) Walter Benjamin, Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century in Reflections Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York, Schocken Books, 1989 [1955]): April 4 Colonial Cities Case Study: Algiers and the Plan Obus Discussion of the Islamic City and the cultural codes, economies, religious and political influences shaping its development from the 16 th to the 19 th centuries. Followed by an overview of colonial urbanism highlighting especially the views on tradition developed by French colonial architects and urbanists. This will be followed by the analysis of Le Corbusier s Plan Obus for Algiers, Algeria. Public and private as gendered, religious cultural, economic + social relations Scale + form of the so-called Traditional City (nolli plan positive and negative space in the Islamic and Christian medieval city) Urban design as the management of difference or Seeing the Other Part II Orientalism/Occidentalism + the Civilizing Mission

5 Required Readings: * Edward Said, Introduction from Orientalism, in The Critical Tradition, D.H. Richter, editor (Boston: Bedford Books, 1979) * Gwendolyn Wright, Tradition in the Service of Modernity: Architecture and Urbanism in French Colonial Policy, Journal of Modern History. 59, 2, (1987): (A) Michele Lamprakos, Le Corbusier and Algiers: the Plan Obus and Colonial Urbanism, from N. AlSayyad (ed.) Forms of Dominance: on the Architecture and Urbanism of the Colonial Enterprise (1992): (B) Timothy Mitchell, Egypt at the Exhibit in Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988): Film: Battle of Algiers PART II THE STATE, THE CITY + ITS MODERN ORDERS: NATURAL + ECONOMIC INFRASTRUCTURES 26 April 5 Utopian Cities Case Study: Brasilia Presents a brief survey of ideal, or utopian, urban design approaches over the past two millennia, those cities that focus on symmetry, order, centralized power and the control of difference through design. This is followed by an examination of the case of Brazilian modernism and the social and political motivations and consequences of the construction of a city from scratch. Key Concepts; Utopia/Dystopia/Heterotopias Surveillance and Control in the Ideal city (Sanitation and Technology) Blueprint Utopia, CIAM, Modernist Models and Multiple Modernities Reactions to Utopian Urbanism: Informal Urbanism (an introduction) Required Readings: * Ruth Eaton, Preface in Ideal Cities: Utopianism and the (Un)Built Environment (Thames & Hudson, 2002): 7. * James Scott, The High Modernist City: An Experiment and a Critique, in Seeing like a State. How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale UP, 1998): (A) Michel Foucault, Panopticism, Discipline and Punish (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977): , (B) Robert Fishman (1996) Urban Utopias: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier in Readings in Urban Theory, Feinstein and Campbell (eds): May 6 Nature (as Metaphor and Infrastructure) in New World Cities Case Study: New York Survey of urban design in the United States focused on the relationship of urbanism and the environment, including discussions of environmental pollution as it relates to control of human and animal populations, and use of natural resources including both urban parks and the hinterlands that support metropolitan growth. Specific discussion of the development of New York,

6 including the role of real estate development and immigration, skyscrapers, tenements and concluding with a discussion of Robert Moses, urban renewal. Key Concepts; Nature as a metaphor for urban society/urban blight Parks as a tool for controlling poverty/blights, relationship to private property Urban renewal (creative destruction, part II) Use of infrastructure to segregate Suburbanization Rejection of the city Required Readings: * Fredrick Law Olmsted, Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns (American Social Science Association, 1860), reprinted in Urban Design Reader, * Marshall Berman, In the Forest of Symbols: Some Notes on Modernism in New York, Part 1, Robert Moses, the Expressway World in All that is Solid Melts into Air (Penguin Books, 1982): (A) Ebenezer Howard, Author s Introduction and Town and City Magnet, in Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1898/1902) in Michael Larice and Elizabeth MacDonald (eds.), Urban Design Reader (Routledge: New York, 2007): (B) Dolores Hayden, Chapter 1: The Shape of Suburbia in Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, (Vintage, 2009). Film: Louis Mumford (1939) The City (30 min.) PART III URBAN DESIGN AS WE KNOW IT: SCALE, FORM + SOCIAL LIFE OF CITIES 10 May 7 Return to the City: Neighborhood, Sidewalk and New Urbanisms of Place Case Studies: Highline, Parklets and Urban Farming Following our discussion of New York, this week will begin with a discussion of Jane Jacobs, resistance to urban renewal at the neighborhood level and the consequences of suburbanization. It will go on to discuss the post-world War II shift in urban planning, especially critiques of top-down design and CIAM modernism emerging from figures like Kevin Lynch. It will conclude with a survey of contemporary urban design thinking focused on renewed interested in the potential of the urban and in the concept of placemaking. Neighborhood-based development from below Everyday Urbanism New (old) conception of Scale traditional meta-narrative Placemaking + contemporary Gentrification Readings: * Kevin Lynch, The Image of the Environment and The City Image and its

7 Elements, from The Image of the City (1960), reprinted in Urban Design Reader: * Jane Jacobs, Author s Introduction and The Uses of Sidewalks: Safety (1961) in Michael Larice and Elizabeth MacDonald (eds.), Urban Design Reader (Routledge: New York, 2007): (A) Allan B. Jacobs and Donald Appleyard, Towards and Urban Design Manifesto from Journal of the American Planning Association (1987) in Michael Larice and Elizabeth MacDonald (eds.), Urban Design Reader (Routledge: New York, 2007): (B) Neil Smith, New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy Antipode 34:3 (2002): [possibly substitute for other Neil Smith] 17 May 8 Return to the Global: Best Practices and the New Civilizing Mission Case Studies: Medellin, Bikeshare and Sustainability in Bogota and elsewhere A discussion of the effects of globalization on urban design practices focusing on the institutional and policy networks that currently circulate best practices to so-called developing nations around the world. This week we will visit narratives of Green Urbanism, Smart Cities and pedestrian and bike infrastructures. Particular discussion of the case of transportation and architectural interventions in Bogota and Medellin, Colombia. Best Practices Green Urbanism + Smart Cities New Infrastructures of Capital Entrepreneurial and Creative Cities narratives New Institutions of Urban Knowledge Production * Jennifer Robinson, Global and World Cities: A View from Off the Map International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 26:3 (2002): * Stephen Zavestoski and Julian Agyeman, Complete Streets. What s Missing? Incomplete Streets: Processes, Practices, and Possibilities, Stephen Zavestoski and Julian Agyeman, eds. (Routlege, 2015). (A) Saskia Sassen. Locating Cities on Global Circuits Environment and Urbanization 14:1 (2002): (B) Melissa Checker, Wiped Out by the Greenwave : Environmental Gentrification and the Paradoxical Politics of Urban Sustainability, City & Society 23, no. 2 (December 1, 2011): May 9 Research Project Presentations 31 May 10 Research Project Presentations 07 June Research Papers Due (exam week) Attendance Policy Since this class meets only once a week, more than two unexcused absences will result in a grade of X.

8 Students who miss class with an excused absence are required to see the instructor in office hours and may be asked to do additional assignments to make up participation credit. Discrimination and Harassment Policy As an instructor, one of my responsibilities is to help create a safe learning environment for my students and for the campus as a whole. We expect a culture of professionalism and mutual respect in our department and class. You may report any incident of discrimination or discriminatory harassment, including sexual harassment, to either the Office of Equity and Compliance or the Office of the Dean of Student Life. Please be aware that as a faculty member, I have the responsibility to report any instances of sexual harassment, sexual violence and/or other forms of prohibited discrimination. If you would rather share information about sexual harassment or sexual violence to a confidential employee who does not have this reporting responsibility, you can find a list of those individuals. For more information about Title IX, please complete the required student module Creating a Safe Campus in your D2L. ASSIGNMENTS + GRADING Reading/Paper Assignments One (1) Reading Summary and two (2) Reading Responses will be required. Each Reading Summary will summarize the key points of the readings for an upcoming class. Reading Summaries will typically be around 1,500 words/six pages. Reading Responses will typically be around 500 words. Students will sign up for these on the first day of class. The 2-3 students responsible for reading summaries will also be responsible for summing up the readings and kicking off the discussion in the second portion of each class. Reading Summaries should answer the following questions: What is the main point or argument of the piece(s)? What evidence do the authors use to support this argument (written and visual)? What sources or references does that piece rely upon? Reading Reflections should answer the following question. These need not address all assigned pieces and may concentrate on one or two readings or significant theme: How does this piece fit within or relate to other pieces we have read this term? What questions or confusions do you have about the piece? What else do you find interesting, important or relevant about the piece(s) for this course or for your life/studies? You will submit the assignment to me via our DL2 site by midnight the Monday before the class for which they are assigned. Late assignments will be graded down one letter grade each day (A to B to C). If they are not submitted by class time on Tuesday, they will be assigned a grade of 0. UNDERGRADUATE Group Urban Design Research Project Undergraduate students will work in teams on research topics chosen from a list generated by the professor midway through the term and will be required to meet at least once with the instructor to discuss the scope and focus of their research. Each group will present their research findings in the last week of class and will submit a group report documenting their research. GRADUATE Individual Research Project Graduate students will work closely with the instructor to develop an individual research paper of 15 double-spaced pages (approx words). They will be required to complete an annotated bibliography,

9 thesis statement, research paper outline and draft paper. Graduate students will also present to their classmates a version of their paper in the final week of class in order to workshop their argument and evidence. UNDERGRADUATE Grading Policies Undergraduate and graduate grading standards as detailed in the PSU Catalogue and Bulletin will be used. Undergraduate grades for this course may be A-F or P/NP. Letter grades are mandatory for the grade to be accepted toward fulfilling Department of Architecture major or minor requirements. Class Seminar Participation 30% Class Reading Summaries + Discussion Leadership (1) (20%) and Responses (2) 20% Group Urban Design Research Project + Report 30% GRADUATE Grading Policies Undergraduate and graduate grading standards as detailed in the PSU Catalogue and Bulletin will be used. Undergraduate grades for this course may be A-F or P/NP. Letter grades are mandatory for the grade to be accepted toward fulfilling Department of Architecture major or minor requirements. Class Seminar Participation 30% Class Reading Summaries + Discussion Leadership (1) (20%) and Responses (2) 20% Individual Research Paper + Class Presentation 30%