History of Urban Design: Urban Transformations in Rome and London

Abstract

Urban transformations in the 19th and 20th centuriesAnalysis and presentation of large-scale urban changes using computer-assisted plan overlays

Objective

In this seminar-course, we will investigate case studies of urban planning in selected cities and analyze them comparatively. Using animated overlays of digitized historical city plans, connections emerge that would remain hidden if the source material was merely compared side by side. In the process, we shall aim to trace out the ways in which urban alterations relate to the location and history of the existing city - and the way in which the alterations themselves serve in turn as historical starting-points for further planning. Architecture and geodesy students will work together in the course. The Chair of Geoinformation Technologies and the Chair of CAAD will accompany the optional course together with us. The seminar-course is an experiment in research-based learning and represents the start of a comprehensive digitally prepared urban development study on exemplary planning and architectural processes.

Content

The urban-planning transformations of large cities in the 19th and 20th centuries will serve as the object of study in this seminar-course. We will focus on selected episodes and attempt to understand them in their context in history and urban space. In an initial step, historical city plans and project sketches of clearly delineated city areas will be investigated and analyzed in order to grasp the general conditions behind the planning episodes and their significance for the city as a whole. From these analyses, detailed problems involving the precise sequence of transformation processes and their conditions and effects will be generated. The historical planning material will be organized and geo-referenced together with geodesy students. The plans processed and graphically standardized in this way will serve as the source material for short animations; the prepared plans will be overlaid over each other in an intelligible way. This technology makes it possible to investigate and comprehend urban-planning transformation processes and their effects on the urban space in a minutely detailed way. Historical planning decisions can be reinterpreted in the context of immediately perceptible before-and-after states. The method of overlaying digital plans provides us with a new tool - alongside scholarly research methods involving text analysis, image analysis, and plan analysis - enabling us to do justice to the process-like quality of urban transformation processes.

Resources