Essential Questions: 

How do cities balance people’s needs, environmental sustainability, and corporate interests?

How are project proposals created and submitted?

How can we design around people’s habits and behaviors?

The way cities make decisions about urban design has been of interest to me for a while. I was initially very interested in architecture, which led me to participate in a design competition for a ‘community market’. I had a lot of fun creating my design, but what I enjoyed most was researching what was missing in the neighborhood, and then figuring out how to best incorporate those elements into my design. I liked thinking about how people would interact with this space, and how it would fit into their daily lives. I also participated in a course about sustainability in cities last summer. A portion of the course was about different types of local city projects, such as bike lanes and parks, and how a lot of thinking about how people interact and behave goes into each small decision. It also focused on the topic of stakeholders in city projects; who they could be, and why they are important. This was all very interesting to me, and has motivated me to explore these essential questions. I feel that I have some solid background information that is helpful going forward, but I still have a lot that I don’t know.

Going forward, I think the books that I will be reading will be very useful in understanding how to design around/for people’s behaviors, especially in an urban context. I started reading Happy City by Charles Montgomery, and it has already provided a good background to start my project off. The book also referenced another book on my list as well (by Jan Gehl), so I think I’ll start reading that one next. To better understand my main overarching question though, I think I’ll need to learn by actually doing. The first step to that would be observing my neighborhood, interviewing community members, researching stakeholders, and researching environmental factors.