URBAN DESIGN STUDIO II

The Fall Studio operates at the regional scale, connecting cities to their variously defined peripheries to engage unevenly dispersed socio-spatial ecosystems. This “city-region” moves beyond a singular biophysical lens to include infrastructures, watersheds, local governments, resources, NGOs, businesses and residents, all of which contribute to ongoing urbanization. As part of the studio, students add case studies to the UD program’s American City-Region archive, a growing compilation of comparative studies which document and represent the complex socio-spatial operations of places such as Laredo and Nuevo Laredo on the Rio Grande, and Denver, sitting between the Colorado and South Platte river systems. The studio asks, “what is regional?”

Currently, the Fall Studio is examining the Hudson Valley, reaching north from New York City and including territory as far as the Erie Canal and Great Lakes. The Hudson Valley-New York City city-region thus includes industrial, agricultural, demographic, technological and transportation systems of vast scope and effect, all of which are under considerable pressure to move beyond (pre)industrial-era problems. The studio explores new industries, tourism, food systems, education, mobility and economic development to enable regional actors and stakeholders to prosper. The Regional Studio asks students to enter this discourse and construct the region by identifying, selecting and representing those actors and features relevant to new forms of intervention. Future iterations of the Regional Studio will maintain the American focus but will shift to examine other sites and situations.

The Regional Studio is also premised on the practice of Urban Design as interdisciplinary, collaborative and researchbased. This entails a challenge to conceptions of architecture or landscape as isolated disciplines, and to instead create opportunities for knowledge overlaps, yielding new forms of design practice. To this end, the studio process goes beyond invited reviewers to include the intensive participation of local officials, organizations, non-profits, community groups, planning and design professionals and other educators.