Lessons from Ten Cities

The Urban Design Laboratory - Fall 2010. Assignment 1: Re-Inhabiting the Urban Core - Lessons From Ten Cities - Two Weeks.Updated with edits per co-author Dr Richard Dagenhart, 11/23/2021This project focuses on the primary ingredient of urban form: the subdivision of urban territory into public and private domains (or public and private usage in some situations). Every project in existing urban cores - urban design, building or landscape - must understand the arrangement and dimension of lots, blocks and streets and their relationships to pre-existing ecological conditions, prior human occupation, previous interventions, political imprints and cultural desire. It is these relationships that irrigate this basic urban form with architecture and landscape potentials. Ideally at least one member of each team will have visited the selected city. The research must be accomplished quickly - realizing that the internet plus the library will have substantial information about each city. The documentation and analysis of each city will be presented in common format and graphics in three parts. First is the urban form in the city’s regional context, which may be geographic, topographic, ecological, political or some combination of those. This should reflect an understanding of the reasons for its location and its origins. Why was the city developed there in the first place? Second is the urban form itself, in three scales: 15K x 15k area of the urban core to show the primary urban form; a 7.5k x 7.5k area showing the urban core itself and its primary form characteristics, and a 1k x 1k area of blocks. The identical scales will allow visual comparisons among the five cities. Third will be a series of diagrams, illustrating the major design moves that created the distinctive urban form for each city. This might be understood as retroactive urban design - looking backward and then rebuilding them in sequence, based on your interpretation of the city's formal history. The conclusion of these diagrams will be a composite.Richard Dagenhar