Syllabus blurb for advanced seminar in urban design theory and practice, Iowa State University, Spring 2019

screenshot of promotional video by MIT Urban Risk Lab’s Prephub project

URB D 522: Contemporary Urban Design Practices/ARCH 575: Contemporary Urban Design Theory

‘Pre-emptive design,’ ‘resilience urbanism,’ ‘proactive preparedness’: Urban design is a practice caught between two irresolvable demands. On the one hand, it is called upon to attenuate the effects of multiple risks that contemporary life produces: urban design must protect the inhabitants of cities and provide infrastructures through which to maintain current modes of existence in the face of climate change and the host of other human and more-than-human crises it precipitates. Contemporary urban design, we might say, measures itself against a field of undifferentiated crisis. On the other hand, today’s urban design, unlike in its modern predecessor, is a venture fueled almost exclusively by an ever expanding financial market for private real…