Advanced Seminar in City Form: Designing for Multimodal Mobility / GSD

The Advanced Seminar in City Form invites a group of students to research and discuss themes about the form of cities in an attempt to relate formal theory, with empirical analysis and urban design. This fall’s seminar will focus on multi-modal infrastructure design.

This fall’s theme – Designing for multi-modal mobility – examines the conflicts and opportunities that emerge when different types of transportation infrastructure collide in urban space. Train lines, seaports, automobile roads, bike lanes and sidewalks – are all essential to contemporary cities for connecting built environments to networks beyond their towns — nationally and internationally — while simultaneously providing a high-degree of accessibility at the local scale. Yet the presence of large-scale transportation infrastructure often introduces urban elements of a scale and grain that conflict with pedestrian accessible environments – they tend to splinter surrounding districts, create high traffic volumes on nearby streets, and require pedestrians to take large detours around the infrastructure. The seminar will explore how “big” transportation infrastructure can seamlessly co-exist with “small” and pedestrian environments, desirably producing both highly walkable and highly efficient urban forms.

Participants will critically examine prior cases and work with a real-world study area at the Port of Tallinn, Estonia, to investigate scenarios for maximizing equitable, multi-modal accessibility (pedestrian, bicycle, tram, car, and ferry) in a complex waterfront district. Case-study analyses and design scenarios will involve hands-on use of the Urban Network Analysis tools in Rhino3D.

See the Final Report from the Fall 2016 seminar, which focused on the redevelopment potential of Tallinn Harbor.

Student Teams

Antara Tandon         Yonghui Chen
Master of Urban Planning   2 Master of Design
Year 2                 Year 1

YungHyun Woo          Longfeng Wu
Doctor of Design Candidate   Doctor of Design Candidate
Year 3                 Year 3

Ramon Gras Aloma        George Bartulica     Yuyun Yin
Master of Design Engineering  Master of Design       Master of Architecture
Year 1                 Year 2               Year 4

Cesar Castro            Betty Vuong
Master of Urban Planning    Master of Design
Year 2                  Year 1

Fan Wang             Maria Gloria Robalino
Master of Architecture       Master of Landscape Architecture
Year 3                  Year 3