Final Reflection

Final Reflection

This semester has provided me with better understanding of how a city works and how a city is even formed.  By understanding the context of a city, it helps us to better ourselves as architects, understanding the purposes of certain aspects in a city. The subject helps contribute to our learning of urban design and planning, how we can use these urban environments to our advantage. The development of cities was an exciting topic, how a city becomes a city, or how a space becomes a place, How a city can be designed differently depending on the context of both the landscape and users. These theories and concepts help me further my development as a student and can help me in the future.

By learning how to describe the city, it comes prominent that depending on the point of view you see the city, it can be different to everyone how they interpret it. Drawing up the maps and outlining different aspects of the city from a birds eye point of view gives you a different perspective on how a city works. By learning how to read the city, we can to terms on how the perspective of the user greatly influences how one views a city. I was doing the city walk with a few friends, and they were looking at different areas to what i was interested in. By reading the city, we can analyse aspects of the city and come up with similar theories on the urban context because of Lynch's theory of: path, district, nodes, landmarks edges. Learning to analyse the city was the most important aspect of this subject, as we based most of our assessment on the resources we analysed using those techniques.

The assessment pieces allowed me to utilise the knowledge that I had learnt in the subject to my maximum potential. However, given the city we were given, it was hard to provide in-depth analysis of the city as the information was hard to find. Given the circumstances, we came up with sufficient amount of material and even found a 3D representation of our city which greatly benefited our cause. The group worked together as a team and produced an extensive amount of material to present.

The final project was much more challenging to me, as it was an individual assignment. I went with the same city, so as i have previously mentioned, getting the information about the city was difficult. Once I determined the topic of interest (due to the lecture), I found interesting information and it became much easier to produce a project with decent material. By understanding the urban context of the city through the analysis from the previous project, it became much easier for me to provide insight on the type of city that luzhou was and has become.

Overall both the projects were a success. The learning process that was required to produce these projects allowed me to understand the city in an urban context much better. The lecture content also provided extensive resources to use and help us understand our cities more.