Encountering the urban, the summer MAUD studio approaches the New York metropolitan region as a collection of diverse urban conditions. Working across New York offers an introduction to urban design that requires developing conceptual and representational tools capable of addressing the complexity and variety of contemporary cities. Students worked in five locales ranging from midtown, the inner peripheries of Queens and the Bronx, the edge city of Newport, New Jersey and the suburban fabric of Staten Island. To embrace the complex dynamics of these panurban conditions the studio concentrated on developing a specifically urban position. This position considers urban design sites as spatially extensive (working at many scales simultaneously); urban design programs as operationally integrated (characterized by more than locally limited use-functions); and urban conditions as historically contingent (shaped as much by unpredictable futures and unknown players as by prescribed design actions).