Datascapes & the Informal City (Fall 2013)

During the Fall 2013 semester, Datascapes & the Informal City was a Special Topics Seminar offered at the Barnard + Columbia Colleges Architecture Department. The seminar asked questions on urban informality combining methods of spatial analysis, data collection and criticism, visualization and representation, and rapid prototyping with 3D printing.

The Course

For the course’s purposes, the ‘informal’ was defined as the typically undocumented processes and relationships within the city which are often predicated on perception, on tradition, or on social behaviors that either are not or cannot be easily recorded through the standard means of data collection. Often these include topics for which quantitative metrics or otherwise reliable survey instruments fail, those for which the most affected populations are systematically excluded through sampling biases, those for which ecological fallacies corrupt statistical results, as well as those which simply change faster than information is gathered.

In many ways, the course sought to test the extent to which we may understand and describe what we cannot readily sense in a dynamic and complex geosocial system as the interaction between the layers of information we can quickly access. As such, these informal urban processes were modeled as the resultant spatial relationships between analyzed datasets either publically available or created through field work.

Through project-based learning, students engaged topics and skills that are often taught separately, synthesizing theory with practice and the development of critical hypotheses with the design of rigorous methodologies. The final deliverables function not only as the product of their endeavors, but as communicative objects for the discussion of urban issues often difficult to describe, as further evidence that no singular dataset may sufficiently describe complex conditions, and as proof of concept for currently evolving techniques of analysis and design. This multifaceted and situated approach to teaching and to social systems inquiry has become invaluable at a time when urban informatics is ever-growing, quality data is more widely available than ever, and yet social landscapes change faster than at any time before, and crucial questions remain either unanswered or unasked.