URD1512H F
Instructor: Kanwal Aftab
Meeting Section: L0101
Friday, 12:00PM - 3:00PM

“It is a puzzle to find some simple word for the sensed quality of a place. There are fine words for the separate sensations: look, sound, touch, smell. But if we speak of the sense in general, we are left among the ghosts of old controversies… [sense] refers to what one can see, how it feels underfoot, the smell of the air, the sounds of bells and motorcycles, how patterns of these sensations make up the quality of places and how that quality affects our immediate well-being, our actions, our feelings and our understandings.”

- Kevin Lynch, Managing the Sense of a Place

 

“As human, we live in environments, amid technologies, learning by doing. Our bodies are instruments through which we become aware of the world beyond our skin, the archives in which we store that knowledge and laboratories in which we retool our sense and practices to changing circumstances. Bodies, in these senses are historically malleable and contextually specific. Our sense are the conduits through returning habit and reflect, the ways we habituated to our changing habitat.”

- Joyce Parr, Sensing Changes

 

“There’s really no such thing as ‘the voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard.”

- Arundhati Roy

This course approaches a sensuous study of place. To decenter a gestalten approach to the city, the course looks at foreground urban life as a multi-sensory experience.

The desire for placemaking is central to the project of Urban Design and drives both real estate speculation and the design of public spaces such as parks, community centres and streetscapes. Placemaking is key to driving the experience or "spirit" of a place, yet design solutions to the design of "places' are increasingly formulaic, presenting us with the same vision of the city. This course aims to multiply "perspectives" of urban phenomena by amplifying ways of knowing a "place" that are ignored, overshadowed, misrepresented, or repressed. Stepping aside from a visually dominated discourse of the urban environment, we will explore embodied histories that understand the city's different temporalities.

The seminar will be conducted through discussion of readings, film and audio media that challenge traditional readings of Urban Form. Course assignments will be a combination of written and visual with one multi-media assignment. To this end, the course assumes a base competency of 2-D and 3-D graphic and editing software skills.