Description:

Neighborhood Analysis is a multi-step activity that explores multiple forms of documentation for experiences and observations to help students understand forms of urban and architectural elements. With a deepened understanding of their own neighborhoods, students identify important architectural and urban aspects of their own built environment through assets and constraints that ultimately inform opportunities to improve their neighborhoods.

  • Layers of Representation
  • Understanding Physical and Ephemeral Quality of Space
  • Learning skills for documentation

Learning Objectives:

  1. Collect images from your neighborhood that capture the urban experience
  2. Describe the experience aligning with collected images
  3. Read imaginative fables and analytical texts to become familiar with the language describing built architectural and urban forms
  4. Study maps and diagrams of urban neighborhoods and learn to identify, interpret, and isolate important features
  5. Develop graphic and visual literacy to translate written words and ideas into visual data and abstraction
  6. Develop strategies to read, decode, analyze, and make maps
  7. Present the work to classmates

Tools Needed:

  1. Phone with camera
  2. Free photo collage apps – PicCollage

Process:  

Lab 2a:

On your way home:

Create a photo collage of your commute from school to home.

  1. Collect: pictures that document your commute home from school.
  2. Review: David Hockney’s process video covered in the class lecture.
  3. Arrange: use PicCollage or another photo app to create a collage that expresses your experience
  4. Write two paragraphs that narrate your commute. For example:

 I started at the school building, noticed that there were clouds in the sky and worried that it might rain. I looked down the blocks for building canopies that might block the rain.

Lab 2b:

In-class and complete at home:

Part #1:

Abstract mapping; connected to your neighborhood.

  1. Read: selected chapters from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities
  2. Choose: one of the stories that most interests you
  3. Identify: at least 10 architectural elements found within the text
  4. Collect: Sketch and download images of the architectural components found in the story that are also found in your neighborhood.
  5. Assemble: a collage of the items to resemble the narrative

Part #2:

Historical mapping; connected to your neighborhood.

  1. Read: selected from Kevin Lynch Image of the City
  2. Collect: Find and print historical and present-day maps of your community: this includes, your block, your borough, your city, and your region.
  3. Identify the following zones:
  4. Residential
  5. Commercial
  6. Landscape
  7. Circulation; major and minor roads
  8. Transportation
  9. Zones of pedestrian density
  10. Areas of congregation –
  11. Kevin Lynch 5 elements outlined in the reading and found in your neighborhood. (paths, node, landmark, edge, district)

Part #3:

Analyze your neighborhood.

  1. Identify assets, opportunities, and constraints within your community.

Deliverables:

Complete all parts and post to Miro

Blank templates for instructor’s use: Miro Template Lab 2

View student samples on Miro:

Summer 2023

Associated Lectures on Course Dropbox:

Lecture 2a: Capturing the City / Commute Collage

Lecture 2b: Mapping the City