Assignments

Assignments

City Paper:

A paper of about 10 to 15 pages: using the (un)built-utopia studied in the City Mapping assignment and relating that to any topic discussed in lectures.Among the most disappointing papers are those that stick to description of cities, or parts of cities, without pinning these descriptions to some hypothesis or argument. It is possible, of course, to derive hypotheses from interesting data, if you keep on developing categories for understanding the data and finally say something valuable about it all. In social science, this is often called “grounded theory.” More commonly one has a hypothesis—a puzzling question, an unexplored problem, a curious relationship—and finds the appropriate data to validate (or not) the hypothesis.Whichever way you choose to work—inductively or deductively—the intellectual structure should be based on argument, be linked, and be as clear as possible. Remember that designing is a valuable mode of inquiry, and that, as architects, urban planners, and urban designers, many of you have or should have valuable design skills which you can bring to bear in a paper for this subject. There are many valid, unexplored topics in line with the general exploration of the subject, i.e., what are theories of the form of cities which deal with both their spatial, experienced form, and the social environment of these forms.