Systems Thinking as a Methodological Approach to Study Infrastructure Space in Architectural Design Education

In architectural education, urban-scale studies provide an opportunity for architectural students to study the challenges that cities confront and their physical and conceptual frameworks with a multidisciplinary approach. The design process necessitates the critical evaluation of the inputs that define, structure, and govern the cities and the acknowledgement of social, economic, ecological, geographical, and experiential conditions. The critical reading of the city also demands an understanding of its prevailing, speculative, and emergent conditions, which can be apprised through a cohesive structure of relations shaped by directives from various agents. Advocating for a novel methodological practice in architectural education, this approach fosters the engagement of architecture students with the networks, constellations, and associations of contemporary urban conditions. With this conceptual framework, the paper speculates on the potential of introducing systems thinking as a methodology for architectural education, which encourages the study of interrelations between different parties, in diverse scales, to design contemporary urban conditions. It subjects students’ works in the fourth-year architectural design studio, where systems thinking is acknowledged as a methodology to study the notion of infrastructure space. In these studies, infrastructure space is considered as the site of multiplicities, coexistences, and overlaps beyond its typical association with “physical networks for transportation, communication or utilities” (Easterling, 2014). Studying the infrastructure space through a systems thinking approach is believed to enable the integration of inchoate states and territories of local, trans-local, and global occurrences. To sum up, the paper will discuss the outputs of integrating systems thinking in architectural education, and the reconceptualization of ‘infrastructure space’ as an instrumental approach in dealing with the complex structure of cities.