Introduction à l'urbanisme 2024-2025

The CANEVAS summarizes the objectives of this teaching module as: "...to provide the student with a corpus of historical and theoretical knowledge that enables them to draw upon and construct the necessary references for any discourse or intervention related to urban action. The chronological approach, though quite conventional, has been favored to facilitate any potential connections that the student might have with the history of architecture. However, the objective to be achieved through this teaching is the identification of the ideologies, doctrines, and models underlying each of the studied civilizations."

This same CANEVAS breaks down the content of the teaching module into "...four parts, themselves subdivided into chapters. The subdivision into four parts corresponds to clear stages in the evolution of urban history:

  • The earliest urban civilizations
  • Urban utopias
  • Foundational theories of urbanism
  • Contemporary urban planning practice"

To maintain coherence with this CANEVAS, we adopt these four parts as the general structure of our handout. Furthermore, these four parts are organized into the following chapters:

In the general introduction, we focus on discussing the two key concepts of this teaching module: city and urbanism. Various definitions, synonyms, and perspectives are presented, analyzed, and critiqued, while also showcasing the context, scope, and meaning of each of these definitions.

Part I, titled "The earliest urban civilizations" consists of four chapters. They cover urbanism from Antiquity (Chapter 1) to the industrial age (Chapter 4), spanning through the middle Ages (Chapter 2) and the Renaissance (Chapter 3).

Part II, titled "Urban Utopias," in turn, consists of two chapters. They encompass Utopian models of pre-urbanism (Chapter 5), as well as the post-industrial city (Chapter 6).

Part III, titled "Founding Theories of Urbanism," comprises two chapters as well: the urbanism and its theories (Chapter 7) and the 20th-century city (Chapter 8).

Part IV titled “Current challenges of urbanism” comprises two chapters as well: sustainable urbanism (Chapter 9), and urbanism and the technological challenge (case of GIS) (Chapter 10)