What is covered, week by week, and which topics each lecture draws on.
The twelve lectures are one argument in three movements. Weeks 1–3 settle what the ground will take and what separating uses costs you: a site, a block dimension, a zoning scheme. Weeks 4–6 put movement through that shape and watch it fight back — density against the amenity radius, a transit spine against its own subsidy, and a widened road that holds its travel-time saving for three in-game weeks and then hands most of it back. Weeks 7–12 stop treating the district as a drawing and start treating it as a thing that has to be paid for and defended: the utilities under it, a 22% budget cut, the public realm bought out of that cut, a fire on the ridge Week 1 rejected, and then Week 11, which turns the simulation around and asks what its own readouts cannot see. Week 12 argues the whole semester as one plan.
No week introduces a metric the others do not use. The same three — fiscal performance, mobility performance, livability — are read every week, and the lecture’s job each Monday is to name which two of them that afternoon’s studio will make you trade.
Twelve Monday lectures at 10:00, from 22 February to 24 May, with a two-week break after Week 6. Each prepares the afternoon studio: read that week’s brief and bring its named save or worksheet. Jury weeks require completed work before the noon upload.
The resources and access guide explains teaching-room notices, lab access, worksheets and the evidence labels used in every deck. On phones, decks read as a continuous document; on desktop they retain the presentation view.
Site Analysis and the Blank Map
Terrain, climate and constraint as the first design move — reading a site before a single road goes down, and naming the three metrics the studio is marked against all semester.
Week 1 · 22 February 2027
The Grid vs. the Organic Street
Hippodamus's grid, the medieval street and the Radburn superblock — three answers to the same question about what shape a block should be, and what each one does to a walk.
Week 2 · 1 March 2027
Zoning and the Myth of Separation
Where Euclidean zoning came from, what it was built to prevent, and what separating uses costs a district in commute distance and land value.
Week 3 · 8 March 2027
Density and the 15-Minute City
Transit-oriented density and the amenity radius — how far a resident will actually walk, and what therefore has to sit inside the circle.
Week 4 · 15 March 2027
Moving People: Transit-Oriented Design
Headways, network legibility and the transfer penalty — why a line nobody can read at a glance is a line nobody rides.
Week 5 · 22 March 2027
Traffic Engineering and Its Discontents
Induced demand, the one-way-street fix, and the uncomfortable arithmetic of why the lane you add fills up again.
Week 6 · 29 March 2027
Infrastructure You Don't See
Water, sewage and power as capacity-constrained networks — where headroom runs out, and how one quiet failure cascades into the next.
Week 7 · 19 April 2027
Fiscal Realism: Taxes, Budgets and the Limits of Growth
Land value capture and the service-funding tradeoff — what a district can actually afford, and what it gives up in order to afford it.
Week 8 · 26 April 2027
Parks, Plazas and the Public Realm
Jacobs on eyes-on-the-street, and the third place — what public space is doing when it works, and how to read a plaza that does not.
Week 9 · 3 May 2027
Resilience: Hazards, Pollution and Climate
Hazard, pollution and climate as design constraints rather than events — planning for the conditions a district meets once and remembers for a decade.
Week 10 · 10 May 2027
What the Model Can't Show You
Land ownership, displacement, informal housing and political contest — the things the simulation abstracts away, and why knowing your model's edges is design literacy.
Week 11 · 17 May 2027
Capstone Review: The Comprehensive Plan
The comprehensive plan as an argument — drawing twelve weeks of district decisions into one whole a jury can be walked through and can push back on.
Week 12 · 24 May 2027