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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.