Course overview
This studio interrogates practices and theories of urban design. Students develop an urban design project that demonstrates their understanding of the interconnected nature of social, cultural, and technical influences at the scale of the city. Projects may be located within, but are not limited to, Adelaide. Following examinations of a chosen site, students identify and pursue their own projects in response to site-specific issues. These are compared against intellectual concepts and themes of international significance, treating the specific context as a laboratory for testing ideas against understandings of global urban conditions, infrastructure, and city development. The studio comprises a selection of study sites within the overall studio, each with their own specific approach and tutor to guide urban design investigations and development. Studio deliverables and criteria are consistent across each site and group.
Course learning outcomes
- Demonstrate familiarity with the history of urban design, the planned development of cities and the diverse historic range of disciplines and stakeholders involved in this development
- Apply and extend skills learnt in earlier studies including written and graphic modes of communication (hand-drawing as well as digitally produced drafting and image-manipulation), research methods and critical thinking
- In particular to refine imaging and mapping techniques for examination, development and communication of specific propositions
- Analyse and ulitise mappings of environments as complex, interconnected natural and cultural systems including, but not limited to: infrastructural ('green', transportation, communication, energy, etc), hydrological, biophysical, economic, political and legislative processes
- Produce urban design propositions that engage critically with their project's physical, political and historic contexts
- Demonstrate understanding the ways in which urban design develops cogently informed, sensitive and appropriate development scenarios, including appreciation of the necessity to articulate and argue terms for such sensitivity and appropriateness, rather than apply the received ideas of others as self-evidently correct