{"ModuleCode":"DEP5102","ModuleTitle":"Urban Planning History & Theory","Department":"Dean's Office (School Of Design & Env)","ModuleDescription":"This module provides students with a thorough understanding of the urban planning modes and their historical and socioeconomical contexts. It covers zoning, planning modules and plan-making processes. Zoning as the most fundamental tool managing city development and urban life will be elaborated. Topics of the nature and characteristics of urban planning models such as the Utopian City, the Garden City, the City Beautiful, Neighbourhood Unit, and New Town movement, will be covered. The processes of plan-making will be discussed in the context of Singapore and other Asian countries.","ModuleCredit":"4","Workload":"2-1-0-0-7","Types":["Module"],"AcadYear":"2014/2015","History":[{"Semester":1},{"Semester":2,"Timetable":[{"ClassNo":"1","LessonType":"Lecture","WeekText":"Every Week","DayText":"Friday","StartTime":"1400","EndTime":"1800","Venue":"SDE-SR15"}],"IVLE":[{"Announcements":null,"Forums":[],"Workbins":[],"Webcasts":[],"Gradebooks":[],"Polls":[],"Multimedia":[],"LessonPlan":[],"ID":"067feee2-94a6-48b3-b401-8c51f57e2fa2","CourseLevel":"1","CourseCode":"DEP5102","CourseName":"URBAN PLANNING HISTORY & THEORY","CourseDepartment":"","CourseSemester":"Semester 2","CourseAcadYear":"2014/2015","CourseOpenDate":"/Date(1419782400000+0800)/","CourseOpenDate_js":"2014-12-29T00:00:00","CourseCloseDate":"/Date(1431187140000+0800)/","CourseCloseDate_js":"2015-05-09T23:59:00","CourseMC":"0","isActive":"N","Permission":"S","Creator":{"UserID":null,"Name":"Lee Kah Wee","Email":null,"Title":null,"UserGuid":"03af73bb-184a-4007-93a4-3e60b8094a2d","AccountType":null},"hasGradebookItems":false,"hasTimetableItems":true,"hasGroupsItems":false,"hasClassGroupsForSignUp":false,"hasGuestRosterItems":false,"hasClassRosterItems":true,"hasWeblinkItems":false,"hasLecturerItems":true,"hasDescriptionItems":true,"hasReadingItems":false,"hasAnnouncementItems":false,"hasProjectGroupItems":false,"hasProjectGroupsForSignUp":false,"hasConsultationItems":false,"hasConsultationSlotsForSignUp":false,"hasLessonPlanItems":false,"Badge":0,"BadgeAnnouncement":0,"WebLinks":[],"Lecturers":[{"ID":"d03fb6fc-1108-409a-8f5c-61673d1efb9d","User":{"UserID":null,"Name":"Lee Kah Wee","Email":null,"Title":null,"UserGuid":"03af73bb-184a-4007-93a4-3e60b8094a2d","AccountType":null},"Role":"Lecturer ","Order":1,"ConsultHrs":null},{"ID":"ef727cd6-d627-43ef-9c53-d32ab78e5265","User":{"UserID":null,"Name":"Johannes Widodo","Email":null,"Title":null,"UserGuid":"4812eede-0f28-4651-8afc-acf1ea9d6387","AccountType":null},"Role":"Others ","Order":2,"ConsultHrs":null},{"ID":"25c5bb43-a9a2-4c47-a648-983069840a93","User":{"UserID":null,"Name":"Teo Ai Lin","Email":null,"Title":null,"UserGuid":"db8d2905-f3eb-4ca5-bd52-315e0af347e0","AccountType":null},"Role":"Others ","Order":3,"ConsultHrs":null},{"ID":"1e3b4afd-87c1-48fe-9b68-63a034e669e4","User":{"UserID":null,"Name":"SIA CHING SIAN","Email":null,"Title":null,"UserGuid":"aba9ef10-12b8-40e7-80e4-cd302b57bf4f","AccountType":null},"Role":"Others ","Order":4,"ConsultHrs":null},{"ID":"15ad8421-be24-4ab2-abaf-40ab3c7a6844","User":{"UserID":null,"Name":"PRANAV TULSHIRAM CHAHANDE","Email":null,"Title":null,"UserGuid":"e6a88ed8-b2e0-439b-a3f9-715476a6f7b3","AccountType":null},"Role":"Others ","Order":5,"ConsultHrs":null},{"ID":"3eabed23-3901-483c-bff0-d2d338f631e2","User":{"UserID":null,"Name":"SAMUDYATHA MYSORE SUBBARAMA","Email":null,"Title":null,"UserGuid":"e5968994-19d4-47aa-8cd8-497db7ad2363","AccountType":null},"Role":"Others ","Order":6,"ConsultHrs":null}],"Descriptions":[{"ID":"1e5f053b-8835-4692-be49-41f07234cfff","Title":"Learning Outcomes","Description":"This course on the history and theory of urban planning aims to do two things: first, it is a broad survey of the historical conditions that gave rise to different paradigms of planning, and second, it introduces you to some of the most heated debates that impinge on urban planning and development today. How did urban planning arise as a professional, intellectual and political activity? What are the assumptions and values attached to various planning paradigms? How can planners study and intervene into the city, and to what ends? How can we understand urban phenomena like China’s ghost cities, India’s slums, Dubai’s instant city and Singapore’s public housing? These questions have been posed since the 19th century, and we foresee new and old challenges in the future.
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\n\tSYLLABUS
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\n\t26 Jan (Week 3): Introduction
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\n\tRequired Reading
\n\tNone
\n\tSeminar Activity
\n\tNone
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\n\t30 Jan (Week 3): The Industrial City
\n\tAt the turn of the 19th century, large industrial cities like London and Paris were seen by social reformers, intellectuals, artists, industrialists and politicians as sites of crime, despair and political danger. Urban planning was a progressive and utopian enterprise founded at this moment in time to liberate the masses from their suffering. But it was also a project to discipline the workers, maintain political control, and avert the crisis of capitalism. We open the course by looking at how writers at that period in time described the experience of modernity and imagined utopian visions for a better tomorrow.
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\n\tRequired Reading
\n\tGeorg Simmel, 1903 “The Metropolis and Mental Life” in Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (eds) The Blackwell City Reader (Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002)
\n\tBerman, M. 1988[1982]. The Experience of Modernity: all that is solid melts into air (Oxford: Penguin Books), pp 131-155
\n\tSeminar Activity
\n\tPlanning Simulation: Imagining Utopia
\n\tInstructions for Seminar activity next week
\n\t
\n\t6 Feb (Week 4): Colonial Experiments and Utopias
\n\tUtopian planning visions found fertile ground in the colonies. Often, colonial administrators had more power and opportunity to implement and experiment with urban planning ideas in the colonies than at home. These visions were inflected by issues such as race, climate, disease and imperial ambitions, and these combined to shape the conceptualization and implementation of colonial cities. This week, we review some studies that suggest how the formation of urban planning as a profession and discipline did not merely begin in Europe and spread to the rest of the world. Rather, such ideas experienced a circuitous route from the metropole to the colonies and back.
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\n\tRequired Reading
\n\tBrenda Yeoh, Contesting Space: power relations and the built environment in colonial Singapore (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1996): 243-280
\n\tSeminar Activity
\n\tReading Discussion
\n\tSeminar Activity: Encountering and Representing Difference
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\n\t13 Feb (Week 5): Making and unmaking the Modernist City 1
\n\tBy the 1960s, “Big Planning” in the West was under siege. Critiques were thrown by activists, intellectuals, and even planners themselves. The failed projects of big planning ranged from public housing to urban renewal to infrastructural work. We look at the classic David-Goliath battle waged between Robert Moses, the powerful bureaucrat of New York City and Jane Jacobs, a journalist and mother of two. In this confrontation, we see the roots of new paradigms of planning. It marked the turn from big top-down planning to more sensitive approaches that took into account everyday life, social interactions and local participation. We will consider Kevin Lynch’s and Oscar Newman’s work in the areas of urban design, and the rise of “advocacy” in planning – developments that continue to shape planning debates in the Anglo-American context.
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\n\tRequired Reading
\n\tDavidoff P, 1965. “Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning”, in Journal of American Institute of Planners 31(4): 331-338
\n\tCheckoway, B, 1994. “Paul Davidoff and advocacy planning in retrospect” in Journal of American Institute of Planners 60(2): 139-143
\n\tForester, J. 1999. The Deliberative Practitioner: encouraging participatory planning processes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), pp 61-84
\n\tSeminar Activity
\n\tReading Discussion
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\n\t18 Feb (Week 6, Wednesday): Making and Unmaking the Modernist City 2
\n\tThe modernist project has been a world-wide phenomenon. Le Corbusier’s Radiant City and the influential International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM) helped to advance the principles of Modern architecture and urbanism. The city that followed the principles of CIAM most closely was Brasilia. I will introduce anthropologist James Holston’s analysis of the modernist city of Brasilia and how it ultimately failed to achieve its larger vision. We also look at Pruitt Igoe, the ill-fated public housing project in the US which became the scapegoat of all that was wrong with modernist planning. Finally, I consider the original documents produced by Singapore Planning and Research Group, an independent think-tank in the 1960s and 70s that proposed alternative visions of “Asian Modernity” for Singapore. Just as big planning was dismantled in the West in the 70s, the visions of modernity were taking its root in Singapore.
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\n\tRequired Reading
\n\tJames Scott, 1999. “Authoritarian High Modernism” in Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 87-102)
\n\tSingapore Planning and Urban Research Group, SPUR 1965-67, SPUR 1968-71 (Singapore: Singapore Planning & Urban Research Group, 1965, 1968)
\n\tSeminar Activity
\n\tReading Discussion
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\n\t21 Feb – 1 Mar: RECESS WEEK – NO CLASS
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\n\tNOTE: Submission of Paper Abstract by 2 Mar (Mon)
\n\tThe paper abstract is a concise and structured summary of what your final essay is about. It should say three things: 1. You should state clearly what your question is, or what exactly you intend to explore; 2. You will say how you intend to answer this question, or go about this exploration; 3. You will make a case as to the significance of your research. You should also give a tentative title to your paper and a list of at least 3 books or articles that you think are useful to your research. Total number of words: 300
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\n\t
\n\t6 Mar (Week 7): The Rise of Scientific Planning
\n\tWar mobilization entailed comprehensive coordination at a national scale, and it is not surprising therefore that the World Wars lent much legitimacy to the promise of big planning. In the US, postwar prosperity and optimism in science energized planners who began to see their work as an objective and value-free enterprise. “Scientific planning” was the alternative to fractious politics. We review some of the classic texts that capture this optimism in “scientific planning”, from “systems theory” that tried to uncover deep unchanging patterns in urban life to technologies of mass production and standardization to dramatic visions of techno-utopias where machines can liberate Man from suffering and toil.
\n\t
\n\tRequired Reading
\n\tJohn Friedmann, Planning in the Public Domain: from knowledge to action (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987): 137-156
\n\tHorst Rittel and Melvin Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning” in Policy Sciences 4: 155-169
\n\tSeminar Activity
\n\tPlanning Simulation
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\n\t
\n\t13 Mar (Week 8): MOVIE - Edward Burtynsky’s Manufactured Landscapes
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\n\tRequired Reading
\n\tTsing, Y T. 2010. The Great Urban Transformation: politics of land and property in China (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp 5-32, 93-121
\n\tSeminar Activity
\n\tMovie and Reading discussion
\n\tIndividual Consultation on paper abstracts
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\n\t
\n\t20 Mar (Week 9): Spectacles of the Postindustrial City
\n\tIntimately tied to globalization is the appearance of cities centered on consumption and leisure. As manufacturing industries moved offshore, many cities transformed into tourism sites, cultural capitals and bohemian enclaves. For now, I scan the vast landscape of “spectacular cities”, from Las Vegas to Beijing to Singapore to Dubai, designed to attract capital investment and accommodate a certain urban lifestyle. I will also introduce some key analytical concepts and theoretical frameworks that help us think about this global phenomenon critically.
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\n\tRequired Reading
\n\tZukin, S. 1989 [1982]. Loft-living: culture and capital in urban change (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press), pp 1-22, 82-125
\n\tSeminar Activity
\n\tReading Discussion
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\n\t27 Mar (Week 10): A critical perspective of Marina Bay
\n\tMarina Bay is a site of spectacles. But what kinds of spectacles? What meanings are embedded in the images and forms that make up the experience of this space? Who are the intended audiences? What kinds of effects are achieved by this careful scripting of space? This week, we hold our class at the Marina Bay Gallery and Marina Bay Sands, followed by a seminar and a self-guided exploration of the waterfront.
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\n\tRequired Reading
\n\tNone
\n\tSeminar Activity
\n\tPhoto Essay
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\n\t
\n\t1 Apr (Week 11, Wednesday): Social justice and the “Right to the City”
\n\tThe question of planning is inescapably tied to the conflicts between public good and private interest. From anti-globalization protests to Occupy movements to localized community groups, social organizations around the world are struggling over the right to inhabit and use space. One key arena of such struggles is formed around the phenomenon of gentrification, generally understood as the transformation of neighborhoods from poor to rich. For this week, Dr. Zhou Ying from ETH-Future Cities Lab will share with us her research on gentrification in Shanghai, Xintiandi. In her presentation, she will discuss how cultural identity, local and central governments and foreign capital investment shaped the urban environment and how old and new users adapted to and re-appropriated these spaces.
\n\t
\n\tRequired Reading
\n\tHolston, J. “Segregating the City” in Insurgent Citizenship: disjunctions of democracy and modernity in Brazil (New Jersey: Princeton University Press), pp 146-199.
\n\tSeminar Activity
\n\tPresentation of “Marina Bay” Photoessay
\n\tReading Discussion
\n\t
\n\t10 Apr (Week 12): Development and its discontents
\n\tBy the mid 20th century, decolonization and capitalist expansion (otherwise known as “globalization”) produced a new arena of intellectual and political activity – “Development”. Suddenly, there appeared a cluster of “underdeveloped” countries that needed expertise and funds to catch up with the “developed” countries. This week, we touch on some of the most provocative scholarship about the “Global South” – namely Latin America, Indonesia and India, and show how planning is implicated in both the exploitation and salvation of this underclass of cities. Finally, we return to Singapore and the region by discussing the politics of the trans-regional haze.
\n\t
\n\tRequired Reading
\n\tEscobar, A. 1988. “Power and Visibility: Development and the Invention and Management of the Third World” in Cultural Anthropology 3(4): 428-443
\n\tRoy, A. 2005 “Urban Informality: toward an epistemology of planning” in Journal of the American Planning Association 71(2): 147-158
\n\tSeminar Activity
\n\tReading Discussion
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\n\t17 Apr (Week 13): Singapore: “Developmental State”, Public Housing and Urban Renewal
\n\tAfter 12 weeks, we return to Southeast Asia, and consider a label scholars have used to describe Singapore – the “developmental state”. It is the case of heavy state intervention in all aspects of economic, social and political life in the name of development. Urban planning is, in that sense, a state-led project founded on a central assumption: only long term, forward-looking, centralized planning can work in Singapore. This claim of exceptionalism is tied to various ideologies that guide planning practice. We consider two things that make Singapore “exceptional”: its public housing system and its brand of public-private partnerships.
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\n\tRequired Reading
\n\tJun Wang, 2012. “The developmental state in the global hegemony of neoliberalism: a new strategy for public housing in Singapore”, in Cities 29: 369-378
\n\tPow, Choon Piew, 2011. “Living it up: Super-rich enclave and transnational elite urbanism in Singapore” in Geoforum 42: 382-393
\n\tSeminar Activity
\n\tReading Discussion
\n\tInstructions for Closing Roundtable
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\n\t24 Apr (Week 14): Politics of Practice
\n\tIn this closing lecture, we zoom into the politics of practice. How do planners make plans? What is the function of the plan and how does it work as an instrument of power? What other technologies of controls – from architectural/urban design to land use to taxation – shape the city and how can we interpret them as spaces of political contestation? In other words, while planning practice may seem to be rather technical and mundane bureaucratic processes, we try to unpack these practices to reveal the assumptions, ideologies and power-relations that undergird their operation.
\n\t
\n\tRequired Reading
\n\tLee, KW. 2014 “Feeling like a State: design guidelines and the legibility of ‘urban experience’” in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38(1): 138-154
\n\tSeminar
\n\tReading discussion
\n\tClosing Roundtable