Urban Metabolism: tools from the social sciences for architects and designers

ARCH 351 treats the city less as a backdrop for buildings and more as a living system of flows — people, resources, capital, waste — whose politics shape what eventually gets built, especially housing. You'll work mostly through readings in actor-network theory, urban political ecology, and urban regime theory, write short homeworks responding to them, give a presentation, and develop a term project that applies one of these lenses to a real urban situation. It's an elective that pulls social-science methods into the design studio mindset, useful if you want your later studio and thesis work to engage seriously with the power dynamics behind any site you're given.