The Urban Design program engages the complex processes of global urbanization amid the emerging stress of the climate crisis. 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.

This studio explored watery landscapes and contested urban terrain in Colombia, with a special focus on climate justice in Cali, Cartagena, and Bogotá. As a studio we asked, how has risk been produced and experienced through spatial exclusion, urban planning, and design? How can we approach “resilience” critically and understand the confluence of social, political, and ecological factors? Rapid development in Cali is provoking investment in the levee system El Plan Jarillón which is intended to “protect” people; however, this adaptation project is also an engine of displacement. How does exclusion from the housing market create and formalize risk? In Cartagena, diminishing water quality and the crush of extractive tourism threatens its bays and creates a divided city of haves and have-nots. Bogotá’s rapid growth encroaches on the critical landscapes of the Cerros de Bogotá, the globally significant paramos ecosystem, and Río Bogotá. How does the right to housing intersect with broader ecological imperatives like ecocide, deforestation, and the collapse of biodiversity and clean water? Students and faculty worked together over the course of the semester to explore how urban designers can act as multipliers of change, integrators of expertise, visionary partners, allies, and advocates.

How can we disentangle urban design and architecture from property? How can we use this moment of environmental and institutional reckoning to disassemble the exploitative regimes of speculation and displacement that anchor the built environment? In other words, where do we go from here? This studio aims to identify temporal slippages and spatial practices that carve out moments of liberation from the limits of property. Studio participants will develop a collective intelligence, by gathering samples from various cultural and political geographies, to experiment with ways of seeing beyond the privatized enclosure in the metropolitan Atlanta region— the city and its sprawling suburbs. The aim is to design a region (with hopes of building a world) that is not tethered to individual land ownership, but instead, predicated on collective stewardship and care. This work will be done by recognizing, drawing, and modeling ordinary spatial practices that operate against the hegemony of real estate—systems that value people over property— in order to develop a dynamic catalog of spatio-temporal constructs. Through radical reinterpretations of historical and contemporary interventions where the everyday struggle begins to approach the surreal—or even, the sublime—we aim to liberate urban design from its historical commitment to borderization. We will celebrate undervalued spatial practices that actively dismantle the cartesian frame of racial capitalism, as a gathering of performances committed to imaging a different world, because the status-quo is untenable. Atlanta After Property reframes the discipline of urban design by reimagining the city of Atlanta in solidarity with contemporary movements of Black liberation, anti-coloniality, and mutuality; working against the ruthless policing, dispossession, and displacement of marginalized communities.

The Summer Studio provides a framework for students to expand their design thinking using New York City as a laboratory. Three ambitions guide the studio research: to nurture a design process specific to existing urban environments, to critically consider site and program, and to interrogate the role of Urban Design in service to the public as a client. More broadly, students are introduced to a post-industrial, built-out American city through its past, current and future layers of neighborhoods, public spaces and infrastructures. This already complex landscape is now implicated in climate change—from sea level rise to extreme weather, from systems failure to environmental justice, and from technological improvements to “sustainable” living. This 21st century landscape also requires an array of emergent Urban Design tools for researching, mapping, investigating and hypothesizing the continuous process of urbanization.

What methods of spatial valuation undergird the disciplines of architecture and urban design? How are these systems of measurement entangled with discursive and material regimes of racialization, ecological degradation, and coloniality? This course considered sites and practices that travel beyond disciplinary rubrics of measurement. Participants examined tactics of opacity, occlusion, and abstraction, in the visual and conceptual arts; paying special attention to nonwestern concepts and sites that are illegible to the ethnographic gaze. Thinking and working against epistemologies of measurement, classification, and bordering, requires developing transdisciplinary knowledge of black studies, decoloniality, contemporary art, and cultural geography. Each week’s readings were split in half between practices of measurement that have been central to the discipline of architecture and extra-disciplinary concepts of immeasurability.