Advanced Seminar in Urban Sustainability II

3 units

This seminar will investigate the practices and measures by which sustainable urbanism is produced, substantiated, and evaluated, both projectively and retrospectively. Cities, where the majority of our resources are both spent and conserved, are sites of great contestation and negotiation where competing interests between status quo solutions and those that reinvent the urban paradigm are critical battlegrounds for a healthy, equitable and lasting future. In recent years, efforts have been made to quantify the "success" of individual buildings, neighborhoods and systems, but a holistic framework for deep evaluation evades those attempting to design, lead, and invest in cities. This course will consider: competing factors at play in the efforts towards sustainable urban production; existing evaluation metrics of sustainable cities and their dire shortcomings; emerging practices of cross-silo, cross-agency, and interdisciplinary urban work attempting to produce new, model paradigms; competing and complementary objectives and evaluations of sustainable, successful, and resilient cities, among other models. Consideration of firms, agencies, non-profits and quasi-public interest groups as well as scholarly, research-based efforts proposing evaluative and projective alternatives will be studied with a particular focus on contrasting contexts. The objective is not to develop a quantitative scoring system for cities, which results in superficial and reductionary grades, but to empower design and research students to understand the value added propositions of holistic urban thinking as a new paradigm for 21st-century cities.