Transportation infrastructure provides much of our public space today and significantly informs the design of our built form. As such, the infrastructure is of critical importance to the design of our cities. As transportation technologies change, the streets and urban form changes also: the medieval street, scaled to walking, is significantly different than the North American city, scaled to the large automobile of the mid-twentieth century. This course intends to interrogate these relationships and to speculate on the impact of emerging transportation technology on the city.

In this seminar students will be analyzing existing design theories regarding infrastructure and urban conditions and begin to interpret infrastructure with a design mindset. Students will be learning how to examine a complex new technology introduced to our urban environment and speculate on design outcomes to benefit society.

>> Objectives for Student Learning

By the end of this course, students should be able to do the following:

_Analyze and contrast current theories of design relating to infrastructure

_Interrogate the relationship between transportation infrastructure and urban form

_Explain the history of the automobile and transportation, analyze its trajectory and speculate on the future of the current nascent transportation technologies based on previous transportation trajectories

_Understand utopic and dystopic futures and how they relate to the issue of transportation infrastructure and urban form

_Demonstrate the ability to analyze and evaluate new technologies in transportation and their impacts on society and then design a synthetic public infrastructure which performs well socially and environmentally.