LAA350 Projects in Urban Development. Architecture, Form and Space

The content of the course is urban development at the project level. Specific development sites will be analyzed, opportunities will be explored and work will be done with quality goals related to physical density, structural relationships and effects on the city's form and content.

H-2024 LAA 350 will work with city center development in the medium-sized Norwegian city x. We will work with urban form, structures, volumes and spaces. The exploration should be interdisciplinary and the results show how the quality of built and unbuilt urban structure depends on a joint effort of various actors in urban development. How to achieve sustainable solutions is a pervasive question.

The subject consists of lectures, workshops, inspections and guidance etc. There will be both work in project teams and individual assignment submissions in connection with these. The emphasis in the course is project work (group) that goes through the entire semester. Each group will explore opportunities for higher exploitation in a given bounded property. The groups will program their task within a common framework. It should be done feasibility studies that:

1) shall assess the financial performance of the unit

2) will be discussed in a contextual connection and transformation object

3) as a contribution to socio-cultural and economic values of the property

4) as a contribution to regional development

5) sustainable development.

The course emphasizes a high degree of independence. Students must through programming phase be able to understand and weigh the issues of the case and select methods to investigate these.Tools and presentations will range from a written material to presentation by means like film or web pages. It may be appropriate to carry out field work during the semester. This will not be mandatory.

In LAA 350, students gain knowledge of and skills in preparing proposals for the development of individual properties within the already built urban structure. At the end of the course, they have gained experience and competence with interdisciplinary problem solving and project work. Students from the master's programs in landscape architecture, urban and regional planning and property development have learned to collaborate and develop a joint project task (a feasibility study). They have achieved a relevant competence for the reality they will face as graduates.

In the course, students gain knowledge of:

• development and change of architecture and urban form.
• Density and spatiality (plot utilization as numbers and shape)
• the environment's effect on people's use and experience of urban spaces building protection,
• energy use and new development opportunities, etc.

Through the course students gets skills in:

• Describe and analyze physical form
• Prepare and compile various analyses
• Use different calculation methods to calculate density and spatiality
• Assess spatial qualities between buildings (including use and experience)
• Assess how structural relationships create accessibility and mobility
• Weigh different solutions against targets for sustainability
• Use different presentation techniques to communicate understanding of context, problem and solution

After completing the course, students will have built up a unique interdisciplinary competence that is relevant to working life, such as, for example, to:

• collaborate in a group on planning goals, methods and process to solve a task and take joint responsibility for the result
• Develop interdisciplinary insight by understanding and balancing different professional viewpoints against each other
• Develop transdisciplinary (holistic) solutions by learning creativity and applying 'design thinking' in practice
• Testing different solutions through an iterative design process which involves being able to receive feedback and process this into better solutions
• Learn to recognize quality in rural environments and communicate about this Gain awareness of your own expertise through interdisciplinary collaboration

After the course, students are able to understand, describe and apply a wide range of theory and methods that are part of urban development processes. The course requires students to use skills and tools acquired in other courses. In this subject, students learn to calculate plot utilization in combination with building up digital 3D models to visualize and test density.

The course requires a strong self-going attitude to learning. The students' learning outcomes depend to a large extent on how the students take responsibility for their own learning and collaborate by utilizing their background knowledge. Students become aware of their own academic background and future role by communicating subject-specific knowledge to others and learning from their fellow students to find solutions across academic positions.

The course requires students to apply skills and tools acquired in other subjects. In this course, students will learn how to calculate plot utilization in combination with building digital 3D models to visualize and test density.