New Urban Ideologies

Catalog description

New Urban Ideologies (NUI) seminar will investigate the ways how urban design traverses ideologies of power that are autocratic, authoritarian and dictatorial. This is an invitation to analyze urbanism and its design powers by looking at dictatorial commissions, their typology, and their stylistic trappings. These ideological trappings with design are manifested in desires to build with iconic urban design and create eternal city beyond the powers of today. 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, spatially innovative and humanely contributive across any of internationally different ideologies, in order to build for the humanity outlasting temporary power? The output of this investigative seminar will be a series of graphic novels on the topic chosen by the students. This seminar is in the genre of research architecture mode, and it is epistemological in nature.