UP510, Plan Making in Puerto Rico, strives to help students develop analytical and practical skills to understand how plans are made as a negotiated process and practice. This course recognizes and pays special attention to a varied range of actors and interest groups who shape plans, in their process and outcome, through invited and invented spaces of action. As such, the course is about plan making not only as a formal process by professionals, but also by a range of actors including artists, activists, and residents through informal as well as insurgent practices. In this expanded understanding of planning and plan making, we learn about the reality on the ground and how users of urban space do the work of city making on a daily basis with or without the “blessing” of professionals. In this sense, the course focuses on how power dynamics constituted through local, transnational, current, and past forces and relations shape plans and are negotiated through the process of plan-making. In short, this course helps students recognize and value how plans and plan making are outcomes of negotiated interests and diverse ways of knowing and doing among varied interest groups and actors, as well as a result of complex histories of past and present.
Acutely aware of the colonial dynamics of professional planning practices in general and in Puerto Rico in particular, UP510 Puerto Rico aspires to a de-colonial plan making. Puerto Rico has a long history of past and present colonization that has shaped the institutional practices and modes of governance and planning. Thus, this course, aims to offer a critical opportunity to learn about the complexities of plan-making processes and practices in a colonial context, explore possibilities to resist and challenge colonial planning, construct alternative planning practices and move toward a de-colonial planning. Through the lens of varied plan making actors in Puerto Rico, we explore political tensions that shape and are shaped by planning and its ethics, strategies and negotiation practices facilitation, mediation of plans, and varied expressions and techniques.