Masters of Architecture in Urban Design
Master
In Mumbai
Description
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Type
Master
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Location
Mumbai
Facilities
Location
Start date
Start date
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Course programme
Masters of Architecture in Urban Design
The discipline of Urban Design addresses the areas of shaping the urban landscape that lie in between the strict disciplinary boundaries of architecture, urban planning, landscape design, infrastructure planning, social studies and environmental design. Each of these fields seems to draw strict disciplinary boundaries around itself; protecting its specialized field of operations, while the interstices between them are often left untended. Urban design attempts to break apart these strict compartmentalisations, making space for integrated and complementary exchanges.
The city today is a highly contested domain. As varied actors and agencies take upon themselves the act of imagining, creating and maintaining it, there seems to be a complex network of agendas that tear the city in different directions. Our tools and methods of understanding and intervening within these complexities seem limited.
In our cities today, on the one hand, large scale developments like special economic zones, large infrastructure interventions seem to promise a kind of utopia in a day; smaller resistances and strategies seem to be completely ignored. These marginals end up displaced to the periphery or form tactical formations in the city in constant danger of being effaced.
As cities transform, urban design has to contend with and find its place among the various forces that transform the urban landscape. It has not only to deal with the aesthetic and physical aspects of urban form, but also to engage in a more critical manner with the processes of transformation. To intervene within this scenario may require the design practitioner to understand these dynamics and engage with them in a variety of roles.
The course, seeks to formulate forms of practice that are able to engage with these dynamics. It also seeks to expand the idea of practice from involving the merely physical into the larger realm of cultural practice in the city, and attempts to integrate diverse media such as film, painting, sculpture, installation and literature into its scope and its modes of representation and intervention.
Masters of Architecture in Urban Design