Contemporary Landscape Architecture Seminar

This lecture/seminar course explores the recent and contemporary debates in landscape architecture and urban design and concentrates on the discourses of urban planning since the late nineteenth century and how contemporary urban debates led to current trends in practice. In this course, we will discuss theories, histories and practices that have shaped our understanding of urban design. We will survey the ideas of influential people who have addressed urban problems and changed the shapes of human settlements, suburbs, cities and regions through urban design and development. We will analyze the values implicit in each of their proposals, stressing the fact that urban design is not only a physical design process but a balancing of political, economic, cultural and physical factors that impact a place and its inhabitants. The course will also provide information about why urban design is a collaborative work and what range of professions are involved. In this framework, the relationship between urban design, landscape design, architecture and planning will be discussed and the contemporary debates about the significance of these relationships will be studied further.