ARC3105H S
Instructor: Michael Piper
Meeting Section: L9101
Synchronous
Thursday, 9:00AM - 12:00PM

A leasing company in Etobicoke subdivides and rents single-family homes to upwards of 18 residents. Hindus gather in a Scarborough industrial park in a former mechanics shop to worship on weekends. Scattered across the Toronto region and often far from transit, tower in the park apartment buildings are home to a majority of the city’s low-income residents and racialized minorities. These three examples of urban occupation defy conventional ideals that designers and planners have about the benefits and values of density and suggest that current mainstream discourse is somehow behind the times.

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Since the latter twentieth century, a particular culture of density emerged within design and planning thought. Reacting to the dispersed nature of modern-era, post-World War II suburbanization, professionals and scholars promote compact, high density forms of city building most often associated with city centers in Europe and North America. Such dense areas are well served by transit, retail, and open space; are walkable and offer opportunities for impromptu social interaction for its residents. These qualities have been ingrained into the design culture of schools across North America, and are written into policies and zoning codes that govern city building. They are, however, available to a progressively small and wealthy portion of residents in North America today.

Behind the façade of single-family homes, in the varied shops of ethnic strip malls, or the unexpected activities of 7-11 parking lots – often without access to transit— immigrant populations and low-income residents of North America’s urban periphery are producing new cultures of density. The goal of the course is not to fetishize, or emulate these cultures, but rather, to attempt to withhold judgment, and to present them as legitimate examples of social life.

This seminar will explore alternative ideas about density through methods of urban analysis, visualization, and representation. Students will be provided with a list of such alternative forms of density as described above and will have the opportunity to identify their own examples. Using scholarly journals, news media, and other potential sources; students are asked to research such conditions. This work will borrow from methods of ethnographic analysis that produces knowledge about lived experience, however, given requirements for social separation, it will be carried out at a distance through secondary accounts. From this analysis, students are asked to visualize the built form and urban space of these lived experiences through a series of typological, axonometric drawings, and collages. The final deliverable will be an e-booklet that compiles student research and visualizations.

To support this work, there will be a series of readings and discussions on the following topics: the political economy of urbanization, definitions of density, othering, the production of space, everyday urbanism, and new urbanism. There will be technical lectures and discussion about methods of practices of urbanism, ethnographic analysis, typological analysis, as well as drawing and representation.