Urban Design: Policy & Implementation
The course will explore urban design policy, with emphasis on its current status and recent past, and will examine how to get quality urban design accomplished. The course will focus on Atlanta, but it will relate to other historical, geographic and political contexts as well. Through readings, research, class discussion, field activity and case studies, we will explore what urban design is, how it is done, and whether and how it might be done better, both here and elsewhere.
Urban design at its core is a connective discipline. It seeks to understand, organize and synthesize in visual and other tactile ways sustained improvements in our urban living environment. As such, its essence is to link people with people, people to places, and places to places. Through dynamic and holistically conceived planning, design and development activities, urban design seeks to respond to citizens' aspirations for an improving daily life.