As an UrbanEngineer, you are the director of this epic Anthropo(s)cene! Your objective is to take cutting-edge innovation and combine it with ancient wisdom to create resilient and adaptive cities. Using tools like systems thinking, causal maps, story cards and hand-on models, your team will follow these five steps to creating YOUR CITY STORY:
Students embark on a global journey, building teams and knowledge regarding what an adaptive and resilient city looks like for a particular geographic location. They learn to apply systems thinking models to develop ideas and concepts about how lifestyles, resources and technologies need to be adapted for different locations, geographies, and climates.
Summary of each phase:
1. Values situating the students' needs and values in their own context, creating and building small teams of 4-5 for the project.
2. Big Ideas
providing them tools to understand and analyze a "system" they know - i.e. school, park or other observable location - then use causal maps/feedback loops to understand how change happens in a system.
3. Designing
applying a systems model to understand the human (lifestyle/density/mobility) and natural (geography/climate/resources) context in a city and defining "Big Ideas" and "Guiding Principles" for each of these aspects. Building a community (hands-on with a map and manipulatives), analyzing resource life-cycles and inventing a product.
4. Adaptation
what happens when something in their city changes? How did their Big Ideas and Guiding Principles hold up?
5. Your City Story
telling the story of their city
