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.