Introduction / Urban(inven)tories

An increasingly urbanized world has presented designers with myriad of challenges. The advent of new technologies, political shifts, climate conditions, economical goals, historical imaginaries, issues of wellbeing and social injustice spurred varying urban responses and approaches forming the modern urban condition.

As urban designers, beyond playing an active role in urban formation, our duty lies in studying, documenting, analyzing, and theorizing these conditions. Additionally, understanding the methods of application and their guiding principles to account for the merits and failures of such conditions is essential to the urban design discourse. What influences the modern city after all? Does the urban form follow a singular set of principles or are we living in confluences of urbanisms?

Looking at urbanism through different lenses, ranging from human focused social urbanism to environmental centered ecological urbanism, the urban condition is evidently a complex and intertwined set of urban phenomena that weave a web of experiences and fields through which the human experience is cultivated.

This booklet of abstracts highlights the outcomes of studying what such experiences, and aims to shed light on what constitutes urbanism(s), essentially presenting an inventory of conditions, influences, forms shaping cities across the globe. The abstracts represent a research body of work produced for the Theories & Methods of Urban Design class held at Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan.