The pre-Columbian history of the Americas has undergone profound revisions in the last three decades. Several authors have been attempting to compile and synthesize discrete, yet radical, contributions stemming from the fields of archaeology, anthropology, ethnography, ethnoarchaeology, biogeography, (environmental/ecological) history, virology, epidemiology, soil science, agrarian studies, political ecology, critical regional studies, and other fields. Emerging visions of the pre-Colonial Western Hemisphere that diverge from hegemonic narratives offer important lessons on urban ecology that can contribute to reimagine the city of the future, as designers seek for principles that may guide contemporary urban (design) culture towards reestablishing a cyclical and renewable relationship with the environment. In this course, we will closely examine a series of pre-Columbian agro-ecological urban constellations at the regional, nodal, and architectural scales in North, Central and South America. We will discuss notions such as rurbanism, urbanism beyond the human, and bioeconomics as a productive structure based on polycultures (away from the introduced model of monoculture plantations). Reconsidering urbanism from these perspectives will require a survey of diverse ontologies of the urban and cityness. Furthermore, we will approach this research seminar as an editorial laboratory. Students will be reading and commenting on unpublished chapters of a book on the contemporary significance of Native American systems of planning; as well as their architectural, territorial, regional, and environmental design contributions. Furthermore, initially in pairs, and later individually, students will focus on an in-depth study of two pre-Columbian cities and the regions they are part of. They can expect a reading and drawing intensive course. The best visualizations of the pre-Columbian urbanisms that we will examine shall be included in the book for publication. Finally, there will be an important field research component to this endeavor. If feasible, we will travel to the central coasts of Peru, where we will be able to experience Lima´s huaca system, Norte Chico (the oldest urban system in the Americas), and Chan Chan firsthand. An alternative field trip within the U.S. would focus on mound building in North America, specifically, as it manifests in Cahokia.
Note: Unfortunately, the Omicron variant prevents us from traveling.
Methodology
The first four weeks of class will be devoted to an ontological analysis of the “urban”. We will ask the basic, yet challenging questions: What is a city? What is urban? What is rural? What is the genesis and evolution/non-linear transformation of the urban? We will study canonical classic and modern texts of the Western tradition and critique or reinforce their assumptions using the Amerindian perspective as a lens. The rest of the seminar will focus on the multi-scalar analysis of a series of case studies. Students will analyze through drawing and supporting texts two cities, one of them in pairs, the second one, individually. To adequately interpret the agroecological urban constellations under analysis, students are expected to read not only the required papers and chapters, assigned per week, but also complementary sources stemming from their own inquiry. The proposed lens for urban and architectural analysis is attention to the way in which a culture spatially produces and establishes a relationship with the land, within and beyond its hybrid system of rural urbanization. The relationship between “nature” and “culture” must be emphasized in both descriptive and analytical drawings. Pre-Columbian cities were highly biodiverse and the rural (understood as agroecological) is not separate from the urban. Multi-scalar nodes belong to networks of social, cultural, religious, economic, and often linguistic autonomies. Ecological design as rurbanism should be made manifest in the final drawings, as both “nature” and “culture” have agency in the co-creation and co-production of an urban ecology. The regional scale, which clearly displays the relationship between multi-scalar nodes and interstitial hinterlands, will be subject of visualization as well.