PLANNING STUDIOS

First Stage Planning Studios:

In our Department, first-year planning studios are conducted with the aim of developing basic design skills. The exercises conducted to achieve this goal should be enriched in content so as to enable students to develop a more direct relationship with urban systems.

It would be appropriate that the first-year studio includes exercises which would facilitate the perception of the system concept and the representation of the interaction among systems. It is believed that the exercises offered in this planning studio should be organized to enable students to get acquainted with various relational concepts, concerning social system, location system, the spatial interaction within and between systems, hierarchy, order, hierarchical organization, multi-dimensional connection patterns in hierarchically organized systems, and process (traffic) control. In the evaluation of exercises that will be developed for the first-year studio, the following criteria can be used:

- how comprehensively the framework of solution has been explored,

- how creative the developed idea and proposed solution are,

- whether these are presented in an appropriate, meaningful and valid language. In order to give the algorithmic reasoning ability expected in this studio program, it has been found appropriate to offer the courses related to computer languages and programming, starting from the first year.

The basic aim of the second year studio is to intensify on the relatively abstract system concepts which are dealt with in the first year and to form correspondence relationships between these and concrete urban structures. In the second year studios, the languages, which can be used to identify and define the spatial interaction between spatial systems and within these spatial systems themselves and various design exercises to regulate this interaction and finally some simple design-planning problems can be handled with the aim of analyzing the characteristics of different kinds of urban components and the organization of spatial relationships among these components. The sensitivity and skills concerning the comprehension of geographical data and the evaluation of maps and other cartographic material are expected to be obtained during the second-year studio activities. In the evaluation of the second-year studio work, various criteria can be used, such as sensitivity to natural geographical constraints, the skill in reading maps and using graphical language, the development of reasoning by means of algorithms and the ability to construct models, problem identification and creativity in alternative solution designs. In the first- stage planning studios in the first two years, it is aimed that the students will have obtained theoretical and practical skills related to the analysis of multi-dimensional hierarchical structures as well as the ability to interpret the functional part-whole relationships and to form correspondence relations between these concepts and geographical and cartographic data. As the main emphasis in the first- year studio is on concept-sensitivity and development of representation ability, the second-year studio will mainly concentrate on forming correspondence relations in geographical context, identifying problems and developing alternative final designs.

Second-Stage Planning Studios:

The second-stage studio activities (third and fourth-year studios) should be conducted using the same urban data base. In other words, the fourth-year studio activities should depend on the data collected during the third-year studio. In addition, summer practice will be organized to collect data for the third-year studio and to set up a codified data base. This has two advantages:

First of all, the time spent on collecting data within studio activities will decrease and it will be possible to spend more time on activities with higher theoretical and conceptual contribution, such as data evaluation and problem identification. Secondly, the nature of the second-stage studios is quite different from the first-stage studios. While theoretical preparation is of vital importance in the first stage, comprehensive planning processes based on real data prepared beforehand are stimulated in the second stage. Summer practice after the second year to be conducted by one instructor every year is expected to make the transition from the first stage to the second easier for the students.

In the third-year studio activities, the cartographic and quantitative data gathered in Ankara as well as the local data and observations obtained through a short excursion to the study area will be evaluated together. Another target of the Department is to store the collected data and completed work by using a predefined computer format to be used in other studies and to establish the urban data archives. ( Since the fouth-year studio will be conducted based on the cartographic material and quantitative data collected in the third year, it is of vital importance that usable and storable data and documents are produced in the third year. Accordingly, the relationship between studio activities will provide mutual control possibilities on the quality of the produced knowledge and the analysis activities. It is expected that this control will have a positive impact in general).

In addition, the new program comprises some major courses to support the third-year studio, such as Planning Theory(ies), Planning Techniques (Methodology) and Urban Economics. It is believed that the third-year studio which is based on the carefully produced quantitative and cartographic data will be more successful in identifying the problems of the selected city and proposing valid solutions. Moreover, developing the quality of the cartographic and quantitative data in this studio is definitely required to realize the fourth- year studio program which basically deals with specific problem areas. Another important difference between the current third-year studio program and the suggested one is related to scale. Instead of dealing with all the scales starting from master plan scale to implementation plan scale, it is proposed that the major emphasis should be kept on general comprehensive planning. As will be considered below, making detailed implementation plans of urban problem areas constitute the major field of interest of the fourth-year studio program.

In the fourth-year studio projects, the general comprehensive planning work related to the city studied in the third year and other information should be taken over as the basic data. In other words, in the fourth year, local data collection, evaluation and the simulation of the general comprehensive planning process should not be repeated and the third-year studio work should be used as data. It is expected that this approach will allow substantial economies in allocation of time and provide the opportunity of exploring in depth the issues and projects which are richer in content and scope. (Naturally, this approach does not prevent the attempts related to data collection concerning the identified issue or problem area or comprehensive evaluation activities related to the problem). The fourth-year studio activities may concentrate especially on the thematic problems (transportation, housing, recreation, etc.) which are specified related to the city studied in the third year or a problem area whose limits are determined. With respect to this aim, some new evaluation and interpretation exercises can be performed using the data collected during the third year. In this context, the following set of issues can take place on the agenda:

a. Urban (Local) Administration budgets and financial analysis,
b. Analysis of land ownership pattern and its transformation possibilities,
c. Urban demography analysis,
d. Urban and regional recreational possibilities,
e. Intra-city transportation systems,
f. Real estate market analysis,
g. Urban economic and geographical analysis related to rent surfaces,
h. Urban design projects,
i. Evaluation exercises related to urban design projects,
j. Political evaluations related to local power structure,
k. Evaluation related to urban social geography, the geography of voting behaviour, or historical background. It would be useful to emphasize some of the characteristics of the new program concerning two-stage studio activities.

1. As stated above, the time spent on the collection of data is minimized and studios programs are mainly directed to more interesting and efficient activities, such as discussion, theoretical preparation, data evaluation, analysis, and interpretation.

2. On the other hand, the level of success of studio work is made dependent on the quality of data collected in the first stage (perhaps during the summer practice). This dependency is expected to attach a new responsibility dimension to data collection activities and make this laborious work more meaningful.

3. In the new studio organization model, data collection as well as storing this data in the most economic way and providing an easy access to this data gain a strategic importance. As this is related to the technology used in training, it also has another aspect which increases the value of labor spent on data collection. It is also apparent that other than these aspects, this approach tends to possess some pedagogic advantages in encouraging the interaction processes among students which seem to have disappeared in time.

4. The new organization pattern and priorities developed with respect to planning studios facilitate the new and positive relation patterns and connections between theoretical courses and studio activities. In the present organization pattern, this relation is generally one-directional; i.e. courses supporting the studio activities. Although this relation pattern is appreciated, it is found necessary to open some channels to make this relationship function in both directions. Specification of topics and issues that will be dealt with in studios beforehand may lead to an increasing interest in the courses and investigated issues and make the content of the courses more relevant.

In order to enforce the mutual interaction between the courses and the studio activities and make this interaction more relevant, some changes have been made in the position of the courses in the program. In fact, starting from the third year, the number of must courses are reduced and students are encouraged to take the elective courses in different options according to their field of interest. As will be seen below, the number of must courses is minimized in the fourth year in which the most specific and specialized (realist) studio activities are performed and students are directed towards various sets of elective courses according to their fields of interest and the issues they deal with in studios. It can be seen that in the suggested program there is only one must course other than planning studio in the fourth year. In this case, students of the Department of City and Regional Planning should take 7 elective courses in two semesters. These courses can be selected from different options, based mainly on Design, Social-Qualitative and Quantitative aspects, offered in the Department of City and Regional Planning as well as from minor or double major programs. It is believed that both different fields of interest to which our students can be directed and minor and double major programs followed by students will enrich our studio activities and our training in the department in general. During the preparation stage of this program, the list of minor programs in METU and the courses offered were still not determined. The large number of service courses offered in the first and second years provides students with the opportunity to follow these minor programs. It is believed the first-year program which includes must courses on Statistics, Mathematics, Computer, Economics, Anthropology-Sociology and History enables students to transfer to various minor programs.

In the new undergraduate program, the number of courses has fallen from 43 to 34 and the number of elective courses has increased from 4 to 10. This partly eliminates the disadvantage with respect to the number of courses in the program of the Department of City and Regional Planning, which is one of the departments with an undergraduate program with the largest number of courses. In order to enable students to follow minor or double major programs more easily, they can be exempted from some of the introductory courses that will be offered in these programs.