SE.3 – TWO-TERM Elective Seminar
URBANIZATION.ORG
The Science of Making Cities
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Faculty: Honorata Grzesikowska Advisor:  Vicente Guallart

Most of us were born into a world of countries, but by the time we leave this planet, it will primarily be a world made up by 600 powerful cities. To help improve the lives of cities around the world in the future, we need to understand the past and the present. We need to know our habitat. We need new education on everything surrounding us in the urban environment – The Science of Making Cities.

Urbanization.org was born to face an undebatable fact that we live in the century of cities, and many of the challenges we have to manage as a society, depend on us finding a better way to live in them. Urbanization.org is a platform that promotes a rational analysis of the urbanization issue at a global scale, so that the challenges cities are facing in the coming years are addressed in a more efficient and understandable way, for the benefit of the common good. We live in a world that every hour of every day, breakthroughs in frontiers of research and development, ranging from artificial intelligence and big data to automation, are transforming our world, and the number of people directly or indirectly connected to the Internet will soon be close to 100%. Yet the cities do not share fast enough the knowledge between each other because the same enormous mistakes are made even in the margin of 20-30 years later.

In this seminar, students will contribute to the platform by forming a part of a collective production of knowledge of existing situations that will eventually give the answer on finding a better way to live in the 21st century of cities. Students will bring the input to the collection of rich reality situations from the world, by analyzing them using predefined tools and templates. They will work on two topics of the platform: urban fabrics and streets. Urban fabric, because it is a morphology of the city that defines the physical aspect of urbanism. The street itself, on the other hand, is a public easement, one of the few shared between all sorts of people, that sustains a range of activities vital to civilization. During the process of analysis, the student will be introduced to the parameters with which will be changing the existing analyzed situations into new future advanced designs. After completing the seminar, students should be able to fully comprehend and understand how quality urbanism results from continuous change and how in-depth analysis help to improve and understand the complex nature of cities.