4.163/11.332 Urban Design Studio
Fall 2016
Instructors: Fadi Masoud, Miho Mazereeuw
TA: Garine Boghossian
Studio: T-R 1-6 pm (10-485)
Terra-Sorta-Firma: Seeking Resilient Urbanism in the C-11 Basin:
With nearly 20 million residents, Florida is one of the country’s fastest growing states. Its ubiquitous suburban landscape is enabled by the continued manipulation of a dynamic estuarine environment and a pervasive real-estate-driven housing pattern. Thirty-five miles of levees and 2,000 hydraulic pumping stations drain 860 acres of water per day, resulting in the ‘world’s largest wet subdivision’ with $101 billion worth of property projected to be below sea level by 2030. The overall structure that defines Florida’s cities emerges from the combination of hard infrastructural lines, developer driven master plans, reductive normative zoning, and rigid form-based codes. These conventional tools have proven marginally effective in dealing with the increased vulnerability caused by Florida’s inherently dynamic ecological forces and constantly fluctuating environment. This renders traditional static “object-based codification,” which has defined much of contemporary urban design, inadequate and in urgent need of innovation.
Several counties in South Florida began a review of their
comprehensive physical planning documents since executing the
Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact in 2010.
Accordingly, Broward County (north of Miami-Dade) will serve as the
studio and practicum’s client. Five sites of exploration follow the
C-11 and Dania Cut-off Canals from the Everglades in the west, out
to the Atlantic Ocean. Along the Canal is a representative range of
urban, suburban, agricultural, infrastructural, and ecological,
variations of Florida’s urbanization. Students will have the
opportunity to attend the 2016 Southeast Florida Regional Climate
Leadership Summit in West Palm Beach during the class trip to
Florida October 5th - 9th. At the summit, student will get to hear
“real stories of real success in communities, business and
political sectors examining the environmental, economic and direct
consequences of climate change” from experts and leaders. Students
will have a more targeted meeting with County officials on the
Friday following the summit.Furthermore, the work of this studio
will be highly integrated with the Samuel Tak Lee Lab interactive
multi-media case-study initiative. This means the design and
research generated in the studio will be shared with audiences
across the Institute and around the world.
The studio is broken into three main phases, first a mapping exercise, followed by code research and dynamic multi-scalar design strategies, concluding with an urban catalyst affected by the shifting terrain. The first half of the semester is interlaced with several guest lectures to understand the core principles of the science behind the dynamic flows. The lectures including lectures by groundwater hydrologies, urban ecologists, housing experts, and urban designers. There will also be several workshops with optional additional help to build up skills in both software programs and representation techniques. Through the design process, students devised a set of unique resiliency zoning, codes, land uses, programs, and typologies that were empirical and precise, yet dynamic, flexible, and responsive. These new codes and designs were collected in a compendium of urban design guidelines, provided to the clients as they reconsider their policy documents. By incorporating the indeterminacy of the shifting broader environmental systems, with the pervasiveness and exactitude of planning code, we establish an opportunity for the instrumentality of policy to be a part of the design process and a progeny of it.
The studio is open to SMArchs and MCP students by permission of instructors. The studio counts towards the UD Certificate. For DUSP: students requiring a practicum to graduate will be given priority, followed by those who have prior design experience and / or 11.328J - 4.240J Urban Design Skills.
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