11.123
Big Plans and Mega-Urban Landscapes
Explores the physical, ecological, technological, political, economic and cultural implications of big plans and mega-urban landscapes in a global context. Uses local and international case studies to understand the process of making major changes to urban landscape and city fabric, and to regional landscape systems. Includes lectures by leading practitioners. Assignments consider planning and design strategies across multiple scales and time frames.
Spring 2014
Topics
- “The City and the Storm” - Megacities, Superstorms, and Other Big Problems
- Workshop: Diagramming and CS Suite 1 (Illustrator Tutorial, available in Assignments page)
- Group work / “Desk Crits”
- Assignment 1 Project Presentations
- How to Read a Photograph: Initial Data Collection
- Workshop: CS Suite 2 (Photoshop Tutorial, available in Assignments page)
- Assignment 2 Initial Discussion
- Assignment 2 Presentation & Discussions
- Walking Tour of Southwest Corridor, with Tunney Lee, Prof Emeritus, MIT.
- Final Project Draft Presentations
- Group work
- Final Project Presentations
- Final Project Presentations (cont.)
Readings
- Speth, James Gustave. “Looking Into the Abyss.” In The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability. Yale University Press, 2008, pp. 17–45.
- Garvin, Alexander. “Planning Now for the 21st Century.” In Urban Planning Today . Edited by William S. Saunders. University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
- Murray, Hubert. “Paved with Good Intentions: Boston’s Central Artery Project and a Failure of City Building.” In Urban Planning Today . Edited by William S. Saunders. University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
- Fainstein, Susan, and Scott Campbell. “Theories of Urban Development and their Implications for Policy and Planning.” In Readings in Urban Theory . Edited by Fainstein and Campbell. Blackwell Publishers, 2002, pp. 1–15. ISBN: 9780631223450.
- Fishman, Robert. “Urban Utopias: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier.” In Readings in Planning Theory . Edited by Susan Fainstein and Scott Campbell. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, pp. 21–60. ISBN: 9781444330809.
- Hall, Peter. “City of Dreadful Night.” In Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century . Wiley-Blackwell, 2002, pp. 14–46. ISBN: 9780631232520.
- UN Habitat. “Urban Challenges and the Need to Revisit Urban Planning.” In Planning Sustainable Cities: Global Report on Human Settlements 2009. Routledge, 2009, pp. 3–22.
- Koolhaas, Rem. “Whatever Happened to Urbanism?” In S, M, L, XL: Small, Medium,Large, Extra Large . Edited by Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau. The Monacelli Press, 1995, pp. 961–71. ISBN: 9781885254016.
- Webber, Melvin. “The Post-City Age.” In The City Reader. Edited by Richard LeGates and Frederic Stout. Routledge, 2011, pp. 549–53. ISBN: 9780415556651.
- Soja, Edward, and Miguel Kanai. “The Urbanization of the World.” In Living in the Endless City: The Urban Age Project by the London School of Economics and Deutsche Bank’s Alfred Herrhausen Society . Edited by Richard Burdett and Deyan Sudjic. Phaidon Press, 2011, pp. 54–69. ISBN: 9780714861180.
- Gottmann, Jean. “How Large Can Cities Grow?” In Since Megalopolis: The Urban Writings of Jean Gottmann . Edited by Jean Gottman and Robert Alexander Harper. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990, pp. 149–61. ISBN: 9780801839276.
- Gans, Herbert. “Urbanism and Suburbanism as Ways of Life: A Reevaluation of Definitions.” In The Urban Sociology Reader . Edited by Jan Lin and Christopher Mele. Routledge, 2005, pp. 42–50. ISBN: 9780415323420.
- Mathur, Anuradha, and Dilip da Cunha. SOAK: Mumbai in an Estuary . Rupa and Co, 2009. ISBN: 9788129114808.
- Bateson, Gregory, and Margaret Mead. Balinese Character, Photographic Analysis. New York Academy of Sciences, 1942.
- Vergara, Camilo José. The New American Ghetto . Rutgers University Press, 1995. ISBN: 9780813522098.
- King, Mel. Chain of Change: Struggles for Black Community Development . South End Press, 1999, pp. xv–xxix, 3–8 and 227–61. ISBN: 9780896081055.
- Jones, Van. “The Dual Crisis.” In The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems . HarperCollins, 2008, pp. 19–33.
- Mukhija, Vinit. “Urban Design for a Planet of Informal Cities.” In A Companion to Urban Design . Edited by Tridib Banerjee and Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris. Routledge, 2011, pp. 574–84. ISBN: 9780415553643.
- Castells, Manuel. “City of Bits, Space of Flows: My Dialogue with Bill Mitchell’s Theory of Urbanism in the Digital Age” (public lecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, November 10, 2011) (video).
- Corbusier, Le. The City of To-morrow and Its Planning . Translated by Frederick Etchells. Dover Publications, 1987, pp. 232–47 and 275–88. ISBN: 9780486253329.
- Gans, Herbert. “Urbanism and Suburbanism as Ways of Life: A Re-evaluation of Definitions.” In People and Plans: Essays on Urban Problems and Solutions . Basic Books, 1968, pp. 34–52. ISBN: 9780465054596.
- Hall, Peter. “The City in the Garden,” “The City in the Region,” “The City of Monuments,” “The City of Towers,” and “The City on the Highway.” In Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century . Wiley-Blackwell, 2002. isbn: 9780631232520.
- Hayden, Dolores. “Decoding Everyday American Landscapes.” In A Field Guide to Sprawl . W.W. Norton, 2004, pp. 7–16. ISBN: 9780393731255.
- Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities . Random House, 1961. ISBN: 9780679644330.
- Mumford, Lewis. “Home Remedies for Urban Cancer.” In The Urban Prospect . Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968, pp. 182–207. ISBN: 9780151931903.
- Nordenson, Guy, Catherine Seavitt, and Adam Yarinsky. On the Water: Palisade Bay . The Museum of Modern Art, 2010. ISBN: 9780870707858.
- Spirn, Anne Whiston. “Ecological Urbanism.” In A Companion to Urban Design . Edited by Tridib Banerjee and Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris. Routledge, 2011, pp. 600–10. ISBN: 9780415553643.
- Wright, Frank Lloyd. “Broadacre City.” In Truth Against the World: Frank Lloyd Wright Speaks for an Organic Architecture . Edited by Patrick J. Meehan. Preservation Press, 1988, pp. 351–61. ISBN: 9780891331742.
Prerequisites & course information
Prereq: None U (Spring) 3-0-6 units. HASS-S
Sources
- Course catalogue ↗2026–2027
- MIT OpenCourseWare ↗Spring 2014
- MIT OCW calendar ↗
- MIT OCW syllabus ↗
- MIT OCW readings ↗
- Historical MIT OpenCourseWare offering. Named reading entries and schedule topics are automatically extracted from the linked source pages.