Architecture, Urban Planning and Infrastructure
Is urban planning visible? In which way and to which degree does it shape the built environment of a modern city? What are the traces of the superposing planning proposals and interventions of the technical infrastructure? Do they influence the form of the surrounding individual buildings or does the architectural form remain autonomous and to which degree?
Urban planning is a young discipline that emerged as an offspring of engineering, architecture, local administration, and social science at the turn of the last century in Great Britain, in the US, and in Germany. During the last hundred years it had a decisive impact on the formation of the modern big city varying around the world under the different political and economic conditions. It reached a first peak in the interwar period and a second one in the reconstruction and modernization period after the Second World War. In recent years due to neoliberal tendencies we face a certain decline of its influence in favour of private investment decision.
Urban planning comprises more than the planning of land use and infrastructure. It reaches from technical or social infrastructure to the general regulation of construction activities but also has to fulfil tasks concerning the general representation of political power, has to react to changing social structures and as it’s shaping the general conditions of private and public life. Often the traces of these activities aren’t visible at first sight. They may be concealed or had been physically invisible from the very beginning. Uncovering traces of urban planning, proposed or realized, in the existing built environment can help to better understand the links and interactions between planning and architecture, the relation of planning and building to other individual and spontaneous activities in the urban fabric, and thus to assess the autonomy of architecture in an metropolitan context.
The course will consist of two parts, a lecture series and a project seminar:
The lecture series will introduce to the trajectory of urban planning in relation to architecture presenting famous planning projects, influential planning competitions and important planning theories and debates. Far from being exhaustive these examples will be restrained to paradigmatic cases from different countries of Europe and overseas.
The project seminar will be asking for the representation of networks in the urban fabric. In small groups the participants will visit buildings and situations in Milan, which in different way are representing infrastructural networks for water supply, gas, electricity, waste collection, public transport, radio, internet and others. The task of the working groups will be to describe how these buildings or situations represent or conceal the respective networks in the urban fabric. In a second step the groups will investigate the history of the surrounding quarter and the role and function of the respective network in the metropolitan context. In a third step they will confront their empirical findings with information from primary and secondary sources like maps, reports, planning literature and alike. For this step a reading capacity of Italian will be of great help .
During the semester the intermediate results of these investigations will be presented and discussed in three consecutive steps. These presentations are a central element of the seminar and will define two thirds of the final notification. The remaining third will be resulting of the final presentation and report, which has to contain the essential outcome of the group’s research, not necessarily in the form of a written paper but as well as a visualisation or display of any appropriate kind.

The bibliography will be provided during the course.