Have you ever wondered exactly how many trees are in a forest? How about the exact number of grains of sand it takes to make a mound? In this course, we will determine exactly how many buildings it takes to make a city and how big buildings have to be to count as urban. We will identify the exact boundary between the macro and micro of the built environment: we will define urban-scale.
Students can expect to get their hands dirty, literally, in this course through a series of empirical exercises. In preparation for the midterm review, we will carefully compose mounds of sand, counting each grain. At the midterm, a highly qualified and experienced urban panel will judge which are mounds and which are merely many grains. The final will be a trial of creating an assembly of building masses to make an urban-scale environment. This course will be graded pass/fail, with those unable to correctly identify the bounds of urban-scale losing the right to identify as working in it.