URD1517HF
Instructor: Eunice Wong

Streets are not neutral urban spaces - all streets are sites of power at play. 

From the width of a sidewalk to the number of car lanes, or even the placement of a tree, the way streets are designed constructs and controls access. To civic life, economic opportunities, and even your general day-to-day life.

Yet, often in modern street design, that access is experienced unevenly, shaped by decades of car-centric planning that has left its mark on the mobility potentials of disabled people, racialized communities, low-income populations, women, the elderly, neurodivergent individuals and queer communities alike. 

Therefore, we ask in this course, who has the “right” in “rights of way”? 🤔🚗🚶🚲🚌

Drawing on a cross-disciplinary approach, which integrates the perspectives of architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, urban planning, geography, and engineering, this course will investigate the politics and history of streets that got us here. From there, we’ll deconstruct the “street” entirely, working together to imagine where we could go instead. 

You’ll take tools like journey mapping, path tracing, and emotion mapping to collaborate on field audits, test ideas in real spaces, and even prototype a design that goes beyond traditional approaches to reconfigure mobility potentials and imaginaries. The course will be led by Eunice Wong from the Daniel’s School of Architecture, Landscape and Design alongside Dr. Samantha Leger from the Department of Geography and Planning - an urban designer and a transportation planner, respectively, ensuring that no single discipline dominates when it comes to talkin’ streets.