Why 8850 Form Urban 2016-2024

The following content is provided under a Creative Commons license. Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare continue to offer high-quality educational resources for free. To make a donation or view additional materials from hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare at ocw.mit.edu. This class has been taught continuously since the 1930s. The record dates back to 1956 when Kevin Lynch probably taught it for the first time. This year marks the 34th year in which I am teaching the class. I overlapped with Lynch for two years, and this will be the last time I'm teaching this class. In 1956, Kevin Lynch called this class "The Visual Form of the City". Between 1956 and 1976, he changed the title to "Theory of City Form". I have kept the title the same as it was originally, as I think the word "theory" gives the impression that we have significant theories, which we don't. Our bases are paper-thin, and our logical basis is somewhat vague. We are somewhere between science and art. In the Media Lab, they now have a group called "City Science". I want to know what City Science is. We understand what City Art is. If numerous new miracle consequences are the basis of city science, we will deal with that in the appropriate manner. We will also deal with very difficult things, such as the human experience of good form, which is not a scientific phenomenon at all. In fact, for those of you interested in philosophy, there is a new book called "Cosmos and Mind" by Thomas Nagel, a professor at New York University. He argues that the winnowing of science has led us in the wrong direction. We can't explain concepts such as consciousness or mind with a narrow scientific approach. We need a new teleological approach to science that...