Program Director, Philip Speranza
Collaborating Program Instructor, Ignacio Lopez Buson
Technical Assistant, Matous Komers
Design of cities is changing. Air pollution, sound pollution, water, energy and metabolic processes along with important social inclusion, gentrification and urban poverty problems are growing problems. New data drive urban design methods are critical tools to measure, confirm and provide continued feedback for public and private agencies and the public they serve. The knowledge and expertise to use social media and sensor data has become and will be essential to future urban design professionals.
This ten-week summer urban design program in the Catalan city of Barcelona, Spain offers students insight into ways to measure and design healthy cities for the broad inclusion of people. In-situ work allows the integration of both existing and newly acquired datasets using architectural scaled software Rhino Grasshopper, associated plugins and custom scripts. Sensors platforms and data driven GIS methods are core tools. These new design methods are supported by with a transversal interdisciplinary approach across planning, urban ecology, architecture, robotic engineering, transit and landscape architecture. The most valuable aspect of this program includes key interactions and opportunities proven over the past ten years of the program with repeated and deep collaboration with agencies such as the Barcelona Agency of Urban Ecology, RCR Arquitectes, Aldayjover Architects and Landscape Architects, Barcelona Urban Resiliency, and other experts in urban psychology, film production and sociology. All design projects begin not with technology but with deep research and interaction with local communities and their urban problems, then a critical analytical understanding of urban qualities, quantitative ways to measure them and design that is informed by them.