The seminar addresses selected theories and paradigms of urban planning in a transnational perspective. It aims to 1) provide basic knowledge of key thinkers, theories and paradigms which have informed urban planning in the 20th and 21st centuries; 2) initiate a transnational dialogue on their meaning, development and perception in Germany and the United States and on their mutual interconnections; and 3) stimulate students‘ debate and reflexion of planning’s positionalities and contingencies.
Important questions are: How did the self-perception and self-definition of planning and planners‘ tasks change over time? Which public and private actors are involved in urban development, what are their strategies? How do power relations play out? And in what ways is planning or can planning be transformative? In transnational working groups, students will collaborate to find answers to these questions, based on selected planning paradigms and case studies in the U.S. and in Germany.
The seminar takes place in collaboration with students from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of California San Diego(UCSD). In the initial phase, students get to know each other, and are provided with basic knowledge on the German and the U. S. planning systems. The following collaborative phase is divided into successive steps which help students to develop a dialogue about one key planning paradigm and design a podcast to present their findings (in transnational working groups). In the final phase, students discuss their findings and reflect their transnational collaboration experience. |
