Session Three

Urban Design Principles 
In this session students will work in small groups to discuss the Urban Design Principles outlined in the required reading below; please read carefully and make notes as you read. 

 REQUIRED READING FOR SESSION THREE (click on Session 3 on left side to access reading)

1. Ten Urban Design Principles Every Humanitarian Should Know

Meta Questions

1. 1. Who wrote this article and what was their training?
      • 2015 – Samer Saliba is the urban learning manager at the International Rescue Committee
   2. How does the article focus on environmental injustice/justice?
   3. What geographic and/or social context/space does the article focus on?
      • Cities: Urban planning
   4. What are the five (5) main points of the article?
      • See below
   5. What methods did the authors use to collect information discussed in the article?
   6. What did you learn from reading the article?

Content Analysis

1. Engage the community, they know best what they need
   • Outreach leads to smarter, more efficient strategies
   • Closes knowledge gaps
2. Data helps, too
   • Quantitative
   • Imperical
3. Opportunities come from overlap
   • Collaboration is critical to identify innovative solutions
     • NGOs
     • Public institutions
     • Private institutions
4. Place matters
   • Place determines challenges and opportunities related to quality of life
5. Because place matters, design matters
   • Reducing commute time adds value for people in cities
6. Politics persist
   • work with political partners in order to achieve feasible solutions with greater reach
7. Civil society has a heightened role
   • decisions or actions supported by political power are subject to pressure from civil society
     • churches
     • community organizations
     • protest groups
8. Be inclusive
   • Ensuring the most vulnerable access the services they need in a way that improves those systems for all
9. Be visionary
   • seek to enact durable solutions
   • offer more opportunities to realize them
   • demand innovative and long-term solutions that are not only effective, but improve upon the original, pre-crisis condition
10. Have a long-term plan
    • address immediate needs while striving to achieve a city’s unique vision of the future
    • long-term visions are rarely achieved through an uncoordinated application of projects

Class Notes

• Urban design is the entire set of processes that go into creating an urban space.
• What ideas inform the dominant urban design paradigm?
  • Automobile is dominant
  • Market driven perspective
  • Government is responsible for infrastructure working with private sector
  • Zoning regulations extremely critical to land use planning
  • Attracting business is a top priority
  • Support local economic development by sector/industry
  • Ordinary people do not have a voice
  • Social inequalities are supported by urban design processes
• Breakout groups
  • How are these similar and different from the other ten principles
    1. Engage the community, they know best what they need
       • Outreach leads to smarter, more efficient strategies
       • Closes knowledge gaps
       • Sort of the opposite of the two prevailing paradigms
         • Ordinary people do not have a voice
         • Social inequalities are supported by urban design processes
         • Also fights gentrification and displacement
    2. Data helps, too
       • Quantitative
       • Imperical
       • Surveying to tie in with the first about engaging with the community
       • Helps determine resource allocation
       • Contrasts;
         • People like cars but they are objectively harmful
    3. Opportunities come from overlap
       • Collaboration is critical to identify innovative solutions
         • NGOs
         • Public institutions
         • Private institutions
         • Contrast
           • Neoliberalism is bad because it places the power with the rich and takes collective power away from the people
    4. Place matters
       • Place determines challenges and opportunities related to quality of life
       • Contrast
         • Social inequalities are supported by design processes
           • Who is allowed to live where?
           • Segregation
    5. Because place matters, design matters
       • Reducing commute time adds value for people in cities
       • Contrast
         • Market driven perspective
    6. Politics persist
       • work with political partners in order to achieve feasible solutions with greater reach
       • Contrast
         • Ordinary people do not have a voice
           • Forced to compromise and capitulate to the dominant paradigms without actually solving problems
    7. Civil society has a heightened role
       • decisions or actions supported by political power are subject to pressure from civil society
         • churches
         • community organizations
         • protest groups
    8. Be inclusive
       • Ensuring the most vulnerable access the services they need in a way that improves those systems for all
    9. Be visionary
       • seek to enact durable solutions
       • offer more opportunities to realize them
       • demand innovative and long-term solutions that are not only effective, but improve upon the original, pre-crisis condition
    10. Have a long-term plan
        • address immediate needs while striving to achieve a city’s unique vision of the future
        • long-term visions are rarely achieved through an uncoordinated application of projects

• NIMBY/Banana: build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything
• The doughnut economics paradigm is intended as an alternative to the dominant neoliberal economic paradigm.
  • A different way of thinking about the world
    • Natural resources
    • The way people relate to one another

HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT FOR SESSION THREE CONTINUED

DUE SEPT 9TH 

Watch the video below and be prepared to talk about it in class. This is a complex set of ideas so you may need to watch the video twice to understand the details. Take notes on the concepts and be prepared to talk about them in class. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQCuBGTHwFo
Donut Economics – How economic theories, models, and policies undermine sustainable development

September 9th
Session Three continued: Distributive and Regenerative Design Principles 

This session will focus on how economic theories, models, and policies undermine sustainable development based pm our having already watched the video below.

• Classical and especially neoclassical/neoliberal economic theory was prediscursively constructed in order to establish itself as a hard science when really it is a social science and its precepts are based on culture, not absolute facts about the world or “economies.”