//week six - more history talk and assessment breakdown

Topics to analyse:

mobility - pedestrian/cars/trains
urban history - organic roman style which lacks in grid form - churches
nodes - schools, centres, landmarks

Assessment break down:
Prue - urban history (organic form), history map
Amy - mobility history of chur, mobility map
Conor - mobility today, section
Guro - landmarks and documenting a city, nolie map

reflection... today in the tutorial we got into our groups and worked on the assignment more. The process of breaking down the assignment help get our heads around the work load ahead of us. As one of my larger tasks i was given the job extremely tedious of tracing the city (or at least a large enough portion of the city). By tracing the city we would have a base plan map to form the basis for the rest of the maps, also more importantly to form the lines for the lazer cutter in order to complete our model. After the tutorial today i am feeling quite overwhelmed with the workload to complete but also a little more at ease as i have somewhere to start. 

Lynch and Cuthbert both talk about the public and private domains of cities as if they dictate the urban form of a city. This may very well be the case in most cities, although what i would like to talk about is how the emphasis on public spaces within the last couple of decades has largely contributed to constructing this interesting urban form. The emphasis on safe cities and large open spaces seems to be main criteria of the idealistic new city. It is evident in the image of Chur below that the older parts of the city exhibit a very different layout to those of the new urban surroundings. Streets in the old city are narrow and the lack of public spaces is evident.  When you move away from the walls of this part of the old city you can see how the public spaces present increase, and the houses become separated on their own blocks.

I think urban design which includes sufficient public space is much more appealing if it is done in the right way, as there are many examples of barren wasted public spaces.

Jacob, J. Lynch, K. Castells, M and Mitchell, W. (2003). pp.114-118, 424-428, 475-485, 497-503 in LeGates, R. T and Stout, F (eds), The City Reader, London; New York: Routledge

Cuthbert, A. R. (2003). Designing cities : critical readings in urban design. Malden, MA,
Oxford : Blackwell Pub