Apocalypse Now! (and what that means for urban design students) | Nov 8th at 10:46am
The 2nd Saturday morning session is “An Agenda for Urban Design Education,” with speakers who had to have one to get their jobs. Luminary deans and chairs, with diverse backgrounds and constituencies, crowded the speakers’ table and delivered dense, compact, mixed topic talks of 10 minutes or so each. You could do far worse that to find the recorded versions of these, once they are available, and listen in.
Sudeshna Chatterjee discussed the great challenges of rethinking how to build cities in a dramatically changing north-south world, where her students want more examples in the literature from the global south. Doug Kelbaugh wants the design professions to study together in an interdisciplinary studio setting before settling on whether they want an MUD, MArch, MUP, etc. And those studios should depart from the traditional practice of an isolated building in a greenfield to study infill in mixed-profession settings. He concluding with the bold statement that the new urbanism is often bad architecture while the starchitecture culture is often terrible urbanism, so his dream is that education should combine the best of the two. Unclear was whether he pursued this agenda in his many years as dean of the architecture and planning school at Michigan, or if he plans to do so in his new capacity as the director of urban design in the Dubai-based firm Limitless.
The other speakers revisited these and related aspects of curriculum and professional evolution. As architects, the language tended toward literary and image-laden, and a bit light on either the details or prospects for actual change.
My take? Parsing the substance and consequences of these quick-take big-picture agendas is tricky, and probably unfair. Several mentioned how traditional urban design education doesn’t fit modern times so well as the world it was designed for, and by, not least with the impending prospects—if not doom—of a warming planet. There was wide agreement that urban designers would benefit from greater attention to sustainability considerations, working and learning with other disciplines, and keeping their eye on the ball. Where the ball is getting hot. Getting from here to there is the obvious question.
In that spirit, the rest of the day is devoted to getting more concrete about all this. Let’s hope those steps address the literal as well as the figurative.
Randy Crane (PhD, MIT) is professor and vice-chair of urban planning in the UCLA School of Public Affairs, an associate editor of the Journal of the American Planning Association, and coeditor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Urban Planning.
