Starting from a faculty wide discussion on teaching architecture and urbanism in the nineties at the TU Delft, Faculty of Architecture, I develop a brief historical overview of more recent planning and mapping techniques. During the many meetings at the faculty, discussions swept from ‘architectural’ approaches, to ‘computational’, to ‘urban’, and ‘scientific’. Although more professional experts were involved, coming from Maastricht University where new teaching models were introduced earlier on, the meetings never ended in a consensus on how to teach urbanism. What seemed to be lacking was a more historically informed approach. I use James Corner’s four approaches to mapping techniques to show not merely a ‘technique’, but the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of a particular approach. Every planning technique creates its own ‘social field’ in which it operates: the socius.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.