Urban Ideologies

Catalog description

This seminar will explore new roles of urban design in creating public space in un- democratic societies. The output of this investigative seminar will be a book made of graphic novels. This seminar will investigate the ways how urban design traverses ideologies of power that are autocratic, authoritarian and dictatorial. This seminar is an invitation to analyze urbanism and its powers by looking at dictatorial commissions, their typology, and their stylistic trappings. On the surface these trappings usually include careful design of temporary urban space such as parades, salutes, group photographs, national currencies and stamps, formal and informal busts, and other memorabilia. These ideological trappings are manifested in ultimate desires to build iconic urban design and eternal city. The seminar will investigate stories about urban design that find elastic ways around ideologies of global political power that are already susceptible to it’s own outside; such as for example China’s ideology of “One Country, Two Systems” and more recently Xi Jinping’s policy of “No More Weird Architecture”. What is then, and what can be the strategy of urbanism when traversing differences of geo-politics, dictatorships and new social systems? What are urbanist strategies of remaining independent and spatially innovative? With this accumulated knowledge we will investigate elements and effects of autocratic power produced and solidified as space, urban, artistic or infrastructural. The seminar atmosphere will be made as explorative as possible, with outside visits, active student participation, presentations, relevant literature, workshops and discussion based atmosphere in the classroom.