Cities within the City

WELCOME BACK! After a 2 year hiatus this seminar at the School of Architecture and Planning (University of Auckland) has been renamed Cities within the City and is now co-taught with Jon Rennie.

This seminar questions the popular presentation and understanding of cities (and in fact nations) as singular, complete or designed. Considering the city/nation as an archipelago of networks, infrastructures, operations, situations and conditions and through readings, interpretation of data, identification of situations and by studying the interactions of different urban and wider spatial logics, we will endeavor to discover and make present other cities within the city of Auckland. We will also expand this notion to look for other nations within New Zealand or other versions of New Zealand’s place in global frameworks . In turn we will develop a pluralistic knowledge and contingent approach to urbanism and the social and economic realm in which architecture dwells. Concurrently we will investigate how this city and country is represented and described, asking "rather than with rendering, or perhaps GIS, how might the gist of this city/country, and the interactions within and beyond them, be conveyed?"

In 2015 the Cities within Cities seminar will focus on making these other versions of Tamaki Makaurau Auckland and Aotearoa New Zealand visible through moving image/ data visualization / animation. Working with experts from this field, projects developed in this seminar will be tuned to contribute to FUTURE ISLANDS the New Zealand Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Biennial of Architecture.