Urban Landscapes - mapping approach within large scale planning processes

Seminar | 1.FS.M.Sc.EUS | Dr. Karl Beelen | 3ECTS | 2SWS

This class will focus on “mapping” as a common thread to look at urbanism and landscape and analyze it as a tool that is instrumental in how we see, imagine, and act upon our environment. 
Maps, cities and landscapes have largely overlapping genealogies and registers, that range from the visual and the artistic to the political to the biopolitical. In today’s world maps are part of a larger mediascape of data and infographics. Even a brief look at the visuals and maps produced in the context of the current pandemic, should be enough to make us aware of how much covid-maps and corona-graphs have helped guide our actions, further our understanding, or organize our collective responses to the complex challenges of an invisible and mutable virus. Maps occupy only a small subset of today’s mediascape but they do so with particular fervor and relevance to urban and landscape disciplines. 
In this class we will study base texts at the intersection of mapping, landscape, settlements and planning, and discuss cases set in different geographic contexts of the global North and South. Each session we will explore a different mapping angle to open up different key debates about landscape and planning. We will work through different landscape histories and design contexts to ultimately arrive at today’s accelerating crises, and the disciplinary or political responses to which mapping can contribute. Reading and discussion of texts and cases will go in tandem with a group-based atlas projects exploring the systems that support our daily lives and infrastructures. 

TIME: fridays, 9:15 - 12:30

START: tba

ROOM: tba