Urban Planning Studios

Throughout the curriculum, the emphasis is on real-world problems and how planners can act to improve the lives of urban residents. In doing so, the Program takes the cities of the world as its laboratory. With the program located in New York City, one of the global centers of international commerce and culture and a city experiencing population growth, the faculty looks to the city's planning issues for studios and classroom examples, while students often find their thesis topic there.

Studio is the core teaching model of an architecture school. In architecture studio, students work with their faculty to create individual designs. In the Columbia University Planning studio, there is a real client with a real-world issue that will be analyzed by students working as a team under the direction of the faculty member. The plan that results will reflect data analysis, design analysis, and economic analysis, and will have encouraged students to consider "best practices" in planning as well as encouraged innovative thinking. Studio takes place in the spring of the students' first year, and is thus not a "capstone" project but a way of integrating classroom learning with practical experience early in the students' education here.