The Urban Design program engages the complex processes of global urbanization amid the emerging stresses of climate change. Ways of living in cities and landscapes around the world are increasingly untenable, and now require new forms of research and attention. What is the agency of design in these rapidly shifting conditions? The program frames the city not as a fixed, delineated territory but instead as a gradient of landscapes supported by networks of energy, resources, culture, mobility, and capital. It addresses near and long term threats to local, regional, and global ecosystems, positioning design as both an inclusive, activist, tools-based project for specific sites and communities, and as a critical project examining urban form, process, and knowledge. The following presentation of work from the 2019-2020 academic year illustrates the critical and creative ambitions that students brought to a variety of sites, scales, and audiences. Projects require multi-scalar analyses of urban-regional fabrics and infrastructures, as well as on-the ground interactions with communities and local conditions.

Studio: Tricia Martin and Nans Voron, coordinators; Hayley Eber, Sagi Golan, Quilian Riano, Austin Sakong, Shin-pei Tsay

With Carmelo Ignaccolo, Kyle Hovenkotter, Jesse Hirakawa, Shuman Wu, Digital Techniques; Cassim Shepard, Jesse Hirakawa, Reading New York Urbanism; Noah Chasin, Amy Zhang, Caitlin Blanchfield, Urban Theory and Design in the Post-Industrial Age.


Urban Design Studio I consists of four courses that operate as an integrated design and research curriculum focusing on the New York metropolitan region. All work is based on the coordinated learning of concepts, working methods, historical precedents, research protocols, and representational strategies. Faculty and associates overlap, course times and subjects mix, and design agendas are tested in various settings. This teaching model demonstrates how the practice of Urban Design weaves together varied tasks of storytelling, community engagement, site survey and interpretation, filmmaking, digital visualization, mapping, and 3D modeling, all of which enable students to create urban knowledge and to iterate, represent and communicate design ideas. The core of the 2019 Summer curriculum is the neighborhood. For American metropolitan regions like New York, the neighborhood as contested social and physical territory is central to popular, journalistic, political, and design discourses. It is also a place of experience and emotion. The neighborhood-focus of the studio underscores our role in an ongoing process of change and through which you can rethink, reshape and regenerate an urbanism of the 21st century. In particular, working in post-industrial and climate-stressed conditions requires the critical interrogation and redefinition of multiple layers of existing and historic fabrics and infrastructures (in and beyond the neighborhood) in order to address the social life of current and future inhabitants.

Kaja Kühl, Studio Coordinator
Anna Dietzsch, Justin G. Moore, Jerome Haferd, Liz McEnaney, Shachi Pandey, Raafi Rivero, David Smiley, and Dragana Zoric


Urban Design Studio II operates at the regional scale, asking students to enter the discourse of urbanization beyond cities and to engage the uneven socio-spatial ecosystems that make up this dispersed landscape. The Hudson Valley, a region defined by multiple systems, histories, and geographies, demonstrates the tensions that result from its simultaneous autonomy from, and integration into, New York City, the global metropolis at its southern edge. The Fall Studio is therefore defined neither by political boundaries nor a physical area but, in the tradition of Patrick Geddes, the region is understood as the integration of settlements, modes of production and consumption, and the topographic and biological contexts in which they take place. Taking Geddes further into a biopolitical arena, the Regional studio also accounts for the means by which administration, policy, and stewardship are brought to bear in specific places, among specific populations, and at multiple scales. The Fall 2019 studio worked as part of a GSAPP-wide collaboration, along with the Buell Center, called “Public Works for a Green New Deal,” taking part in meetings and conferences.

Read the full report for the Fall 2019 Hudson Valley Regional Studio here.

Kate Orff, Coordinator
Lee Altman, Adriana Chavez, Dilip da Cunha, Fitsum Gelaye, Geeta Mehta, Thad Pawlowski, and Julia Watson


Urban Design Studio III investigates the process of urbanization in a global context, examining sites facing substantive social and climate change including, most recently, Pune and Varanasi, India, Can Tho, Vietnam, and Aqaba, Jordan. Studio research moves beyond the legacy of urbanism characterized by binaries such as city and countryside, urban and rural, or city and suburb and instead frames urbanism as a continuously shifting assembly of socio-natural systems. In particular, the studio focuses on the water-energy-food nexus in which spatial dynamics are inseparable from the uneven effects of climate change, landscape and ecological degradation, destabilization of housing systems, threats to public health, challenges to work patterns, and the transformation of mobility. Students explore the operative potential of multi-scalar, ecological frameworks for designing robust urbanized landscapes and public spaces. The studio is organized with the intensive participation of local partners, from city governments and planning departments, to humanitarian groups, local universities and community NGOs. The Studio produces exhibitions and public events with project partners and, as the final studio in the Urban Design sequence, students organize a publication documenting process, partnership findings and design proposals.

Visit the Great Rift Valley Story Map.

The Great Rift Valley marks a global transect along geological fault lines. It’s an active space of movement and exchange spanning watery crevices and fertile landscapes from the Jordan River Valley in the Middle East to the Zambezi Delta in Mozambique. The tectonic plates underlying the Rift are pulling away from each other, and expanding socio-political fractures on the surface follow suit. The 2020 spring semester Urban Design Studio explored how three cities along the Rift—Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel; Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; and Beira, Mozambique—might forge systems and spaces to span this divide amid rapid urbanization and while grappling with the unique impacts of the climate crisis. Student design projects imagined creative alternatives to address the interrelated risks faced by vulnerable populations. These include extreme heat in Tel Aviv, flash flooding due to river floodplain development in Addis Ababa, and coastal inundation and disaster recovery in Beira, which was struck by Cyclone Idai in 2019. Marked with fossil evidence from the beginning of human civilization, the Great Rift Valley encourages bold thinking about the Earth’s next 100 years of habitability and urban design response.

The following is an index of portfolios submitted by graduating students from the Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design program. These include projects completed during the Summer 2019, Fall 2019, and Spring 2020 semesters.