The Graduate Program in Urban Design is focused on creating new, equitable, beautiful, and sustainable forms and technologies for the city and urban life. We believe trans-disciplinary designers in general and urban designers in particular are in an ideal position to positively contribute to re-envisioning a series of global urban realities in crisis. Through cultural, technological, environmental, and social engagement, we can harvest a newly found design adroitness to address the problems that render our cities less just, less plural, less safe, unproductive, and environmentally deficient. The Urban Design program seeks emergent urban narratives that can guide design through the aforementioned surplus of practices, orbiting epistemes, and technologies addressing the city.
Far from the smart city movement and tightly codified Western planning efforts, some of the most promising urban practices are emerging in the Global South. These urban practices are bound by another set of drivers that enable a set of complex and advanced anthropologies, economies, and social structures. In addition, they address an enmeshed range of issues such as scarcity, equanimity, densification, resource depletion, and environmental crises. Together, these practices are inciting new urban narratives that spatialize social economies, environmentally responsive practices, and new public infrastructures.
Students in our program will surface the narratives that guide and enable these complex interactions and if necessary dream or induce them to a new reality. Focusing on topics such as diasporas as they intersect with environmental and urban systems, we will promote design methods ranging from systems and processes thinking, to the recalibration of existing urban fabrics, and to novel spatial practices. Hence, in the concerns of cities lie also the opportunities to redefine our practices.
The program is designed to be completed in two full-time, sequential semesters. At the core of the curriculum is the design studio. Committed to both experiment and amelioration, the two-semester program focuses, each year, on a New York City site and, after a research visit, on design of a city in a demanding environment abroad. Projects have addressed sites including Havana, San Jose (Costa Rica), Gaza, the Ecuadorian rainforest; Belfast; Tianjin; Nicosia; Johannesburg; New Orleans; Hanoi, Wuhan, Bogota, Tijuana, Biloxi, and Chicago.
A total of four courses are required each semester. The electives are chosen from the remarkable and wide-ranging urban offerings and distinguished faculty at the School of Architecture and City College at large, the Urban Affairs and Planning Program at Hunter College, and the CUNY Graduate Center.
Applicants to the Urban Design programs should hold a professional degree in either architecture or landscape architecture. Applicants from other backgrounds will be considered only in exceptional circumstances and on demonstration of a high level of design ability.
TOTAL PROGRAM CREDITS: 32
Per-semester courseload: 16 credits
Note: For students who desire a longer course of study, it is possible to distribute the credits over up to three semesters with the required studio and theory courses taken during the first two semesters.
Fall Term 1
UD 61001: Urban Design Studio I
Working both collaboratively and individually, students will pursue the design of an autonomous city in an abstracted setting. The studio-utopian in mood-investigates principles and practices of city design at regional, urban, neighborhood, and architectural scales and engages a wide variety of analytical, representational, and expressive media.
LAAR 63300: Environmental Planning
This course provides an overview of the physical environment of the New York City metropolitan region, including geology, soils, surface water, dominant weather systems, the changing climate, and plant communities, as the basis for an examination of urban infrastructure: circulatory, energy, economic, water supply and management, and solid and liquid waste systems. Large-scale planning initiatives in the New York area are examined from the perspective of how they address the complex local environmental ecologies. Theory and history readings are assigned and discussed weekly to support the class presentations. Each student prepares a colloquium presentation (short paper and slides) on a design practitioner/practice working at the scale of the urban plan. The presentations explore, assess and communicate valuable tactics for ecologically viable design in the urban realm. This course is also an elective in the MS Sustainability in the Urban Environment and Urban Design programs.
UD 62005: City of Globalization
As the world becomes increasingly urbanized, our understandings of the city are changing rapidly. Cities come in all different sizes small, medium, large and mega. Each scale presents different issues and provides different interfaces to global flows of finance, technology, media, migrants and ideas. The concept of the city, which has long provided an orientation to urban space, politics, economy and imagination is increasingly inadequate to capturing the scalar differences unleashed by processes of globalization and the intensification of urbanization across different national territories. This course examines the dominant ideologies of urban form, culture and sociopolitical difference associated with each urban scale. Planetary urbanism, informality, technoutopian views embedded in discourses of `smart’/resilient cities and emerging conversations around conflict as inspiration for urban change are dominant frameworks within which globalization and urbanization intersect. We will follow each of these frameworks and their implications for understanding contemporary urbanization. With a special focus on the anthropology of the city, we will aim to discover the common infrastructures that link cities as different from each other as Gaza, Detroit and Mumbai as well as developing strategies for understanding how history, culture and politics introduce difference into the world of cities. The course will combine lectures and discussions. Students will be expected to write weekly short response papers, summarizing the readings. At the end of the semester, students will collect their response papers into a dossier which will include a personal reflection on the course as well as visual examples illustrating the ideas expressed in course readings.
UD 00000: Elective
There are numerous elective offerings each semester. These may be chosen from the urban offerings and distinguished faculty of City College at large (including urban design, architecture, landscape architecture, and sustainability programs), the Urban Affairs and Planning Program at Hunter College, and the CUNY Graduate Center. For a sampling of recent electives at the Spitzer School, refer to the school schedule.
Spring Term 2
UD 62001: Urban Design Studio II
The second urban design studio will incorporate strategies and methods developed in the first semester in the investigation of a large urban site in New York City. Drawing on a variety of “real world” influences and sources, students will produce viable designs that investigate the interplay of scale, site, program, and vision.
UD 61017: Urban Theory and Urban Design
Urban design stands at the intersection of architecture, urban planning, geography and critical social theory. This course studies key texts and theories of urban design and explores these texts with an emphasis on social and environmental justice. Led in a seminar format, this class will revolve around weekly readings and group discussions. Our reading of theory will also consider empirical matters and give particular emphasis to how these concepts may inform the practice of urban design. Throughout the semester, we will construct our own collective, contemporary, evolving glossary of urban design, as explored from our readings and transformed through your individual research questions. Course requirements will include participation and weekly reflection essays, one papers (final) and one class presentation.
UD 00000: Elective
There are numerous elective offerings each semester. These may be chosen from the urban offerings and distinguished faculty of City College at large (including urban design, architecture, landscape architecture, and sustainability programs), the Urban Affairs and Planning Program at Hunter College, and the CUNY Graduate Center. For a sampling of recent electives at the Spitzer School, refer to the school schedule.
UD 00000: Elective
There are numerous elective offerings each semester. These may be chosen from the urban offerings and distinguished faculty of City College at large (including urban design, architecture, landscape architecture, and sustainability programs), the Urban Affairs and Planning Program at Hunter College, and the CUNY Graduate Center. For a sampling of recent electives at the Spitzer School, refer to the school schedule.
