A: Crucial issues in urban design since 1960. A critical view.

Since 1960, a wide range of opinions has been expressed in the discussions concerning urban design. The fact that the visions of modernism haven’t materialized, has brought about a series of new questions. How can a new and an old city coexist? How can the local and the international co-exist? How can new needs be incorporated and shape cities? How is society organized within the urban web which it somehow shapes? And most importantly in what way does urban design deal with these issues?

Within this framework, we will examine the following:

Density, mixing land use and multiplicity of models of movement (Jacobs, Alexander, Schumacher)

Return to locality (Sitte, Krier, Sennett, Frampton, Rowe and Koetter, Rossi)

Escaping from urban space (Banham, Venturi, Koolhaas, New Urbanists)

The illusion of a non-spatial society (Mitchell, Virilio)

B: The perception of urban space as cultural resource. The role and control of the planning of a city.

Understanding the function of planning in a city goes beyond the reason for planning, through the development of descriptive systems (spatial tools) which can help control planning.

Topology or geometry? The syntactic theory of urban space (Hillier, Peponis, Penn)

Basic tools (visibility, accessibility, movement, encounter, locality, centrality) (Benedikt, Hillier etc)

Methodologies for the representation of urban systems (Batty, Turner)

C: Identity crisis and multiculturalism in metropolitan centres. Urban planning as a mechanism of symbiosis or crisis.

In the course of the past decades, the gentrification of metropolitan centres has greatly relied on urban planning. At the same time, the metropolitan centres have increasingly functioned as reception areas for different social and cultural groups. How can the syntactic theory contribute to the understanding of the spatial expressions of these tendencies and to the control of design?

Within this framework, we will analyse the centres of the following cities:

Athens (Greece)

Nicosia (Cyprus)

Jeddah (S. Arabia)

Atlanta (USA)

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