TA: Aishwarya Shekar | Tamanna Parvin | Swashya Suresh | Sreedevi Kurur | Mallika Sehgal | Gunjan Jangid | Amrutha Balan | Shreesha Arondekar | Giby Abraham | Navnit Sourirajan | Jacob BabyUnderstanding the City Studio
This Foundation studio aimed to develop intimate understanding of a city and equipped students with conceptual, methodological, analytical, and communication skills necessary for becoming a professional urbanist. This studio focused on an evidence-based approach for framing and analyzing complex urban situations and problems. This studio introduced students to weekly focused exercises to understand different aspects of the city. The students employed mapping, observing, representational and analytical abilities to carefully understand the needs of people, conflicting interests, financial or administrative constraints with the overarching goals of livability, sustainability and equity in a city.
The studio operated in ten parallel units with a studio Tutor and a Teaching Associate guiding a group of 15 students. Occasionally, the students were exchanged between the groups for various exercises. The students were evaluated based on the quality of presentations, clarity of thought and strength of analysis for the pre-designed and pre-tested weekly exercises. For this studio, the rigors of student work, the relevance of outputs and healthy relationship for peer-to-peer learning were especially emphasized.
