Bridge the Gap

This is the first unit of the final Junior year! in Urban Planning. In this unit, we looked at aspects of urban planning by asking ourselves the question of what goes into creating a city and by what means does it make it a "good" city. By doing so we had looked at several historical statues, and the changes Chicago's infrastructure has gone through due to natural or human manipulations. This leads us to investigate the material and fundings that go into building a structure and how safe can we be when it comes to knowing when a structure no longer supports. As we dove into the external investigation portion we started to visualize our questions into the real world, we looked at bridges and the similarities they hold when it comes to the shape of the bridge. By determining the shape of the bridge we were able to mathematically dive in deeper with the concept of force and how that gets calculated and shown on a bridge For an FE, we went to downtown Chicago and met Gabriel and Shehana from Metropolitan Planning Council where we then walked around the river and looked at the various bridges and how change gets made in Chicago in an Urban Planning mindset. For this action project, we partnered up with our classmates to make a bridge from popsicle sticks and glue. With the materials given we had to create a truss bridge that could hold at least 10 pounds without breaking. To see if our bridge had passed the test keep on scrolling!