URD1515H S
Instructors: Daniel Rotsztain
Meeting Section: LEC0101
Tuesdays, 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM

This course examines the kind of urbanisms that exist at the periphery of city regions. Often called the “suburbs”, the term fails to describe the multiplicity of urban forms, economic configurations, and cultural expressions that characterize contemporary peri-urban areas. By complicating narratives of the suburbs inherited by normative urbanism and the media (think “Leave it to Beaver” and “the Sopranos”), the seminar will invite a nuanced investigation of these regions to form a base understanding of how they function, informing a discussion of how planning and urban design can support and enhance suburban livelihoods that don’t fit the mold of Jane Jacobs’ “ballet of the streets”.  As wealth continues to concentrate within service-rich inner-city districts and exclusive suburban communities, there is a professional imperative to understand “the suburbs” so that urban planners, designers, and architects can be equipped with the appropriate tools to enhance and support them.

We will begin by deconstructing the terminology of “the suburbs”, contributing to an emerging discourse that treats these essential parts of city-regions as topics of study in of themselves. With a focus on the Greater Toronto Area, we will then discuss the emergence of the hyper-diversity in the suburbs, spatial justice, and the strategies diasporic communities have employed to adapt peripheral regions’ commercial and industrial architecture into essential social infrastructure. The course will conclude with a studio investigation of strip malls, a much-maligned form of commercial architecture that nevertheless play central roles in the social lives of suburban communities. Through the case study of plazaPOPS, a community-lead approach to transforming strip mall parking lots into gathering spaces, students will be introduced to alternative tools and techniques in community-based facilitation, co-creation and design engagement.

Students are invited to contribute to a generative and collaborative discussion that recognizes peripheral urban regions as central to our understanding of the city as a whole. The studio aspect of the course will involve a collaboration with plazaPOPS as the organization prepares for its third cluster of strip mall-public space interventions in 2023.