NARRATIVE URBANISM

This seminar explores the mutual influence of the histories of non-fiction cinema and urban studies in the context of a video production workshop. Students read about, watch, and discuss films that interpret urban conditions or advocate for specific urban reform from the 1890s, 1920s, 1960s, and today. Simultaneously, each student develops and produces her own non-fiction video project on a topic of her choosing. Check out the syllabus here.

Overview:
All designs and plans are representations. Before designers and planners can intervene in urban space, they must learn the tools to observe and interpret urban dynamics and to create documentary evocations of existing conditions. This course focuses on developing qualitative tools of analysis and representation, informed by a deep dive into the history of mutual in uence between documentary media and urban discourse over the past century.

Compelling narratives require recognizing and developing the speci city of your own perspective, your understanding of intended audience and context, and your politics. In this course, we will study a variety of documentary work produced in support of particular strategies of urban reform in the past century — especially lms and videos, but also essays, oral and graphic presentations, and data visualizations — that have been conceived variously as art, journalism, marketing, or propaganda. And we will discuss student works-in-progress in a supportive workshop environment that will hone each student’s voice and approach to narrative urbanism.

Working with data and material from work in studio, thesis research, or original research and documentation, each student will create a documentary project that explores some aspect of the relationship between the physical form and the social experience of cities and places and that focuses on conditions that cannot be captured by quantitative analysis or traditional data.


September 2016

Index: Teaching, Cities, Video