Personal Experience of Studying The Urban Design

As I am an architecture student, joining the Urban Design course was a very interesting and useful experience. I believe urban design and architecture are inseparable subjects. They do interact and support each other. I am interested in urban scale design and planning with designing a master plan but, I often felt I need to study more theory and practice related to urban design when I draw a master plan in the architecture course. Luckily, I had a chance to join the urban design course programmes that include lectures, a design project, and seminars. I enjoyed the course. Especially, if I only focused on beauty and convenience when I designed a city before studying urban design, after that, I was able to broaden my view. For example, I learnt to read and use design code, and sustainable urban design practices. Especially, it was good that I was able to see and learn about the various urban efforts of humans to coexist with nature through theories and examples. Furthermore, it was found that most of the successful cases were supported by political and social programs, not just urban design. So various fields were working together, which made it possible to produce more effective results. In addition, the city council’s efforts to improve the overall design quality of the city/town by providing basic guidelines to designers and architects through design codes were also impressive.

This semester was never easy for me because the timetable for the architecture major and urban design classes often overlapped, and assignments came out together in both majors. I asked the professors for adjusting the timetable, and also, had to catch up with the class progress through recorded lectures individually. Posting academic blogs was also an unfamiliar experience for me. This is because posting blogs itself has never been done before, and posting blogs related to studies is even more inexperienced. However, it was a fun experience because I learned new things by taking lectures and studying more in-depth theories and investigating related cases individually. However, at the same time, I was not used to uploading blogs, so I was immature in setting the layout, and I was also immature in blog-style writing. Nevertheless, other people read my posts and left various comments such as empathizing with opinions or suggesting a new perspective, and I thought that blogging was a very useful tool for communication with many people. In general, joining the urban design class was valuable as it was difficult because there were so many things that I learned. And at the end of this semester, participation in urban design class is over, and I will focus on architecture class again. However, I am going to apply what I learned this semester to my architecture design project. The current architecture design project has been directed to design a water circulation city in preparation for flooding and deepening water shortages caused by global warming and climate change in the period of ‘The Anthropocene’. So, I will apply sustainable and eco-friendly methods across the city scale as much as possible. Therefore, I can’t join the class anymore, but I am planning to continue studying case studies, and research on urban design individually.