According to three professors from the School of Architecture & Allied Arts, the conventional model for urban design and city growth neglects a sizable chunk of its residents.
Gentrification and makeovers within neighborhoods can push out low-income communities through increasing property values. Often a city’s urban design breeds a lower standard of living for certain residents and communities; poorer populations may live in polluted parts of cities and regions prone to flooding, while affluent residents are likely to live upwind from smog and above the flood line.
“The manner in which cities have grown during the Industrial Era and now in a time of global economy raise critical issues in terms of the relationship between social stratification and urban form,” said A&AA Interim Dean Brook Muller.
Muller and two other A&AA professors – architecture professor Howard Davis and department of planning assistant professor Gerardo Sandoval – recognized that they all considered this issue from different perspectives. So they collaborated in founding a new interdisciplinary course, AAA 321: “Inclusive Urbanism.”
The course aims to question the conventional city planning model and analyze how a new approach could be wide-ranging and hospitable to all residents, regardless of demographic.
“The city works best when everyone — rich and poor, black and white, native and immigrant, etc. — has a fair chance of taking advantage of its opportunities,” said Davis via e-mail. “The physical form of the city plays a role in setting the stage for this.”
The four-credit course is investigating the relationship between a city’s physical form and its effect on urban life for residents and their socioeconomic potential. It will analyze this issue from a variety of contexts (a building, neighborhood, district and city) and from multiple planning perspectives (architecture, planning, public policy, landscape architecture, law, social science and environmental studies) to recognize the best ways to promote social equity.
“Inclusive Urbanism” is open to all majors, and is intended to be a component of a new integrative design and creative studies undergraduate major, currently under development.
“We’re trying to capitalize on the strengths of the school and provide students who might not otherwise find an enabling path to enter our school,” said Muller, who added that the new major will include “a core curriculum intended to expose students to the breadth of methodologies within the school.”
Anita M. Weiss, head of the department of international studies, will deliver a guest lecture about urban design patterns in cities such as Lahore, Pakistan, where architecture tends to further gender segregation that isolates women from the public and open spaces.
Muller added that the course demonstrates how a range of perspectives from the school – not just those of faculty but of students as well – can help contextualize this issue.
“We’re enlisting students in these questions to provide a theoretical framework in asking for their contribution in what it would require to make cities more equitable and just,” he said.