NEW URBAN FORM IN EUROPE AND THE UNITED STATES

Introduction
The focus of this seminar is the dispersed distribution of contemporary land settlement patterns and its relation to open space. How has growth actually happened in the world? What new typologies of dispersed urban fabric are occurring in the increasingly autonomous suburban fabric? How are the design disciplines evolving to address dispersed conditions? We will focus on existing and alternative ideologies of dispersal in which certain oppositions like urban vs. suburban, built space vs. negative space will need to be reconsidered. The gray zone in between becomes the field of experimentation.

US/EU
While architects and urban designers often focus on the central city, demographics indicate that we have passed the tipping point: for example in 1994, the U.S. Census documented more Americans living in the suburbs than in traditional cities. The New Urbanist Movement, seems to be the only group of architects addressing the issues of urban sprawl in the US. Their neo-traditional designs and rigorous planning strategies have gained power and political clout but stand alone in a vast field of economical development forces. In Europe, the dispersal of the city is being investigated by numerous research teams of architects and urbanists. Can the design community in the US and the EU address these urban issues with a new language of topographical influences, urban transformations and landscape ecologies, and debate how to design for and inhabit these diffuse cities? With the cultural continuity between Europe and the US as a given as well as their common denominator of post-industrialization, the seminar questions similarities and differences between their typologies of dispersal and the politics behind it. More specifically, the comparison is made between the North-East of the United States and the European region of Randstad Holland and the Flemish Diamond. Can these two worlds of knowledge be cross-fertilized? Can we start assessing the diversity of typologies of dispersal?

Objectives
The purpose of this seminar is to investigate and explore new architecture, urban design, landscape, policy and financial strategies to confront and realign contemporary settlement patterns of dispersal in the United States and Europe. In the new urban form, the negative space between buildings gains more prominence although yet ignored. The course investigates how to re-visit architectural and urban design responsibilities with a new sensitivity for the space in between buildings. We will look at the historic, political, financial, spatial aspects of dispersed urban form, which, although outside of the purview of design education and avant-garde practitioners, demands interdisciplinary collaboration, political will and new research and design ideas for the next generation for architects, urban designers and planners.

Format
The course will alternate invited lectures and readings, with historical and contemporary case studies of the students themselves. The aim is to provide a refreshing and alternative compilation of information in order to widen and challenge our ways of approaching urban form. In the first half of the semester, we will survey the current status of dispersed urban form by assembling decision makers from development, economic, policy, business and “dream” worlds. In the second half, we start to address ways to mitigate these typologies of development with new languages of landform, transportation and ecology, emphasizing thresholds, tensions and latent potential of negative space. The students are expected to pair an existing case study with a site exploration.

Written by SCAPE.