Urban Studies

In this course students explore methods of creating new public domains through designing and constructing small scale architectural interventions in 1:1 in close collaboration with local site and community. A studio is set up away from the university and into sites in transformation that provide students with interesting and relevant contexts to explore and respond to. The focus is on urban areas in transition such as former industrial sites, challenged public or semi-public domains and landscapes that hold potentials for new content. Students examine and reflect on planning issues around the case area that can be investigated form a theoretical and strategic perspective and explore places from a phenomenological and perceptual position by prototyping site-specific urban interventions into an existing spatial situation. Thus, a broad strategic design approach is supplemented by small interventions that can initiate a transformation process. The location provides site-specific context to work into in terms of spatial qualities, planning conditions, historic development, as well as social and cultural character. Through careful site readings, students explore the physical, social and processual conditions of a place. Students analyze site conditions, formulate future scenarios, and construct urban interventions that respond to the current spatial qualities while simultaneously setting out a potential trajectory for the future. The drafting table is complemented by a strong presence on site developing projects in hand-crafted and local customized processes. This approach has important implications for the design process, for the interpretation of the site context and particularly for learning about space through the interaction of analysis and making by hand.

This course examines classical, critical, and contemporary urban scholarship to evaluate the sociological importance of the city in the 21st century. Using both international and local case studies, and drawing on an interdisciplinary approach, students are exposed to a range of critical questions pertaining to the past, present, and future of social life in cities. From the early days of industrialization to the present "age of urbanism," the city has occupied a unique position within the sociological imagination. As a site of conflict and community, inequality and identity, and continuity and change, depictions of the city have attracted a distinguished alumnus of scholars: from Benjamin to Jacobs, Whyte to Wacquant, and Simmel to Sassen. For these thinkers, the city represents a concrete manifestation of broad-based social forces that is simultaneously general and specific, global and local. Particularly through traditions of urban ethnography, the city has proven time and again to be a complex, contradictory, and nuanced social tapestry with distinctive social, spatial, and cultural patterns. For similar reasons, the city has also captured the imagination of countless writers, musicians, film-makers, and artists, for whom the city operates as muse, inspiration, and challenge.

More than half of the world's population lives in cities and far more people depend on cities for their subsistence. The urban world has long stimulated sociologists and scholars from related disciplines to think about a large number of issues that constitute urban life or are constituted by urban settings. Some of these issues are typically urban, some of them merely highly visible in exaggerated forms in the city. Early sociologists saw cities as the ultimate expression of the anonymous industrial society where Gemeinschaft lost its meaning. So from the start, urban sociologists have linked capitalism, urbanism and modernity.

The course discusses current developments in smart city making, like urban games, urban screens and data, maker culture, and media art. These so-called urban new media shape contemporary public space, open up the city to new playful experiences, allow new roles for its citizens and visitors, create new forms of urban agency, and invite alternative ways of navigating the city. The course explores the entanglements between ICTs and the creative city by focusing on the weekly themes, including: smart and creative cities, addressing complex urban problems with digital technologies in today's smart and social cities; citizenship, leveraging the creative potential of cities through participatory culture, co-creation, mobile apps and open data; media art, creative critique on the smart city with locative media, digital art and urban screens; data, interfaces and code, citizen sensing and navigating and authoring the city with location-based technologies and interactive cartography, quantified self, life-logging and mobile story-telling; play and games, reprogramming the city with urban games and play; maker culture, city-making and do-it-yourself hacker culture with the help of new media technologies.

This course provides the essential keys for understanding urban phenomena, including relevant spatial elements in the city and methodologies for understanding of the distinguishing features of cities. It examines the essential features of urban spaces, both from an evolutionary point of view, and in relation to their present configuration. The course also looks at some of the main challenges related to urban spaces, including spatial planning, socio-economic tensions, migration, and urban environment. Madrid's urban reality and its metropolitan area in particular, is examined as a case study.

Intelligent facilities are hallmarks of modern cities; they are designed and operated to help to enhance the quality of living and work. The course explores the concept of intelligence of facilities from various perspectives, and covers how a pragmatic approach can be adopted in translating the desirable features into reality in facilities through technology. Smart technologies, sensor technologies, building control and automation systems, and human-systems relationships are explored. Case studies constitute an integral part of the course.

This lecture serves as an introduction to historical urban studies and its rich spectrum of topics. Using a wide array of questions as our starting point, the course investigates major themes and concepts in interdisciplinary metropolitan studies such as space and place, temporality and history, nature and the urban environment, urban typologies, urban development and ideology, infrastructures and networks. Each session is devoted to a specific question in order to examine primarily the historical but also the contemporary implications of distinct urban developments.