Faculty Projects: Reworking Urban Planning
Commonwealth School teachers bring an infectious intellectual energy to their classrooms, fueled, in part, by their own innate curiosity. What happens when that curiosity is unleashed? The Hughes/Wharton Fund for Teachers aims to do just that, ensuring faculty can pursue their academic passions, access fulfilling professional development opportunities, and have the latitude to create new courses and reinvigorate existing ones.
Over the summer of 2024, math and science teacher Anna Moss '06 dug back into urban planning for her most recent Hughes/Wharton project, revamping her popular course from 2016 to make it even more tech savvy and future proof—much like the most well-designed modern cities...
I had the opportunity to spend a week this summer thinking about how I would approach my Methods in Urban Planning course as a far more experienced teacher and with the knowledge about how students had responded to the course in 2016. I focused on three things: rereading texts, reading and exploring new texts, and reorganizing the syllabus.
I began by rereading my sourcebook, thinking about which texts I still think are vital to the class and which could be replaced with shorter articles or projects, since the class is more about designing than theory and papers. I also wanted to familiarize students with the technology, since SketchUp is not always the simplest to grasp, but it’s moved to an online program that has wonderful resources, and I chose the assignments that will benefit students’ understanding the most.
I then sat down to read three new (to me) books: Paul Knox’s Atlas of Cities, Kevin Lynch’s Site Planning, and Raymond Unwin’s Town Planning in Practice. The first is a highly visual appendix of cities, dividing them into categories like Industrial Cities, Megacities, or Instant Cities. The graphs and tables in this book are definitely going to make appearances in my class, and the concise exploration of Athens as a foundational city will be the reading students do on the first day of class as a way to introduce the procedure for close reading cities. The second book is a textbook that is much more granular than most students will ever need, with things like trigonometric equations for sunlight angles and road grades, but it has an interesting chapter about how design can be thought about from a number of perspectives and with varied interests, so I want to introduce some of that categorization once students are planning their own neighborhoods. Finally I sat down with Unwin’s text, which has beautifully drawn maps of early towns and the development of smaller settlements over time, which might inform later projects since designing an entire city is not feasible over the course of the year.
Finally, I worked on my syllabus, trying to organize each quarter around one larger idea: First, what is a city? (This asks the class to think about how we define cities, how they originate all over the world, and how that definition has evolved.) Second, what defines an early American city? (Focusing on colonialism, industrialization, migration, government, and private interests.) Third, how do cities grow? (Focusing on post–World War I growth with a particular interest in revisions to cities: HOLC maps, New Urbanism, etc.) And, finally, fourth, what is the future of cities? (Thinking about walkability, new corporate interests, eco-cities, and so on).