Events and Workshops

The annual Informal Cities Workshop provides students with an intensive, hands-on opportunity to grapple with frictions and interconnections that exist between the informal and the formal aspects of the city. It consists of a keynote lecture, which is free and open to the public, followed by a one-credit, weekend-long design charrette. Previous workshops have explored conditions in Varanasi, India; Lima, Peru; Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa; and Caracas, Venezuela.

The Lively City: Behavioral Studies & Public Space Design provides students new perspectives and skills that put people and their needs at the heart of the creative process of re-imagining and transforming cities. Concepts that connote inviting, vibrant, and stimulating urban environments—such as livability, lively cities, and public life—are frequently communicated in new visions for the future of cities, but are the most often unrealized component of design projects. This course provides the opportunity to explore these concepts and reconcile people’s often conflicting needs for privacy and social stimulation within urban areas.

Typically a one-week masterclass, The Lively City has been reconceived as a summer workshop in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Students participated in a virtual, immersive experience in Copenhagen (Denmark), exploring innovative techniques of remote discovery of areas such as the classic Copenhagen public space icons in the medieval city center and modern icons like Superkilen and the Bicycle Snake Bridge in the harbor. The workshop was led by Oliver Schulze of Schulze+Grassov. Special thanks to S+G’s Toby Adams for recording video footage of the up-and-coming Rentemestervej street in Nordvest with the Schulze+Grassov survey bike, and to S+G’s Krista Doersch for leading video image analysis experiments that were originally developed in marine biology to study the condition of underwater ecosystems in order to analyze the physical properties of Rentemestervej.