PS776
Advanced Seminar in Policy Studies
Sustainable Urban Design

Dr. Ernest J. Yanarella (ejyana@pop.uky.edu)
Dr. Richard S. Levine (rlevine@pop.uky.edu)
Spring 1998

Introduction:

     This advanced seminar in policy studies takes as its focus the utopian possibilities inscribed in the planning visions, architectural designs, religious testaments, and political ambitions of urban projects scattered across the globe. Beginning with historical, urban-architectural, and cultural cues to good city form, the seminar will highlight both the formal and substantive features drawn from historical exemplars of sustainable urban design from the traditions of medieval urban planning, the garden city and new towns movement, organ town and communitarian planning by Ebenezer Howard, Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford, Paul Goodman, and others. These harbingers of the sustainable city will be juxtaposed against the modernist/(anti-)urban visions of Frank Lloyd Wright, LeCorbusier, and others. The possible role of so-called soft or telematic cities, of virtual or digital communities, populated by netizens in cyberspace as surrogates or complements to hard or geo-spatial cities will also be critically examined.

Seminar Projects:

     Students will undertake two seminar projects using computer, multimedia, and other modeling techniques--i.e. a modest hypertext project focusing on one urban or anti-urban visionary and a semester-long project involving showcasing one of a half-dozen major urban sustainability programs throughout the United States. No prior coursework or experience in developing hypertexts or 3D models is required. Students more familiar with architectural or landscape architectural modeling techniques may freely substitutes those expressions for hypertexts. Course materials, including the syllabus, some course readings, and final projects will be put on the seminar’s Web page.

Course Texts:

     In addition to Web pages listed in the syllabus, the major seminar texts are listed below.  Copies may be purchased at Kennedy's Bookstore.

Fishman, Robert. Urban Utopias of the Twentieth Century. Boston: the MIT Press, 1982. Paperback.

Lynch, Kevin. Good City Form. Boston: the MIT Press, 1984. Paperback.

Mitchell, William C. City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn. Boston: The MIT Press, 1995. Paperback.

     To assist the seminar in exploring the urban design possibilities of advanced compute technology, the seminar will meet on Tuesdays from 2:00-4:30 P.M. in CB 346, one of the College of Arts and Sciences' "smart classrooms." A variety of computer resources is housed in this classroom and will allow for multimedia presentations to enhance the learning environment of the course. (The assignment of this classroom to the seminar by the Dean's office is gratefully acknowledged.)

Requirements:

     The hypertext project will account for 15% of the seminar grade. Using web authoring software, each student will develop a hypertext incorporating written text, images, explanatory notes, and possible web links. The overriding objectives of this project are: (1) to introduce participants to this medium of presentation; and (2) to present the peculiar strengths and weaknesses of urban/anti-urban visionaries measured against the principles and tenets of sustainable urban design. Graduate students may focus on any one of the following: Ebenezer Howard, Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford, LeCorbusier, Richard Sennett, Frank Lloyd Wright, Vincent Scully, Murray Bookchin, Richard Levine, Mike Davis, Sim VanderRyn and Peter Calthorpe, Paolo Soleri, William C. Mitchell, and Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. The due date of the project will be Tuesday, March 3; and each project will be presented at that seminar meeting.

     The major team project counts for 75% of the course grade. Two-person teams will select from among America's major sustainable urban experiments, marshaling a wide array of information, images, and models into an extensive HTML format. Targets for the team projects include: Chattanooga, Tennessee; Seattle, Washington; Richmond, Indiana; San Jose, California; Boulder, Colorado; Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Lexington, Kentucky (!). Among the dimensions of analysis lending themselves to graphical presentation include:

     A variety of sources on the internet (CityNet, Homepages, etc.) and diverse software (Argus Technology's Census: USA, USGS DEMS, Vistapro, SimCity 2000, etc.) should provide rich data and a wealth of graphical images, models, and tables for multimedia presentation. In addition, the WWW contains innumerable Web pages of courses and research projects which should be helpful in designing team projects.  Seminar participants may wish to look at the following Webpages for kindred courses, models, ideas, and hot links for their projects: 4.207 Home Page ; The Text of the City ; LAR7602-Town Planning ; and Geo666 Home Page. Other good starting points are: Sustainable Communities Network-Home ; and City.Net .  A prospectus on the team project is due Tuesday, February 17.  Team projects will be presented during the final seminar meeting on April 28.

     The final 10% of the seminar grade will come from evaluation of each student's seminar performance.

Seminar Outline:

Comments? Contact: Dr. Ernest J. Yanarella (ejyana@pop.uky.edu)
Copyright (c) 1996, 1998 Center for Sustainble Cities, University of Kentucky - All rights reserved.
Graphics and HTML by John Yanarella, 1996-98