Urban Design Strategies and Case Studies

Catalog description

The course will ground students in the basics of urban and spatial design practices as well as the surrounding environmental, sociological, political, and economic dimensions. This course will use primary and secondary source material and theoretical and empirical works to understand cities as complex interrelated environments. Students will learn about the multidimensional drivers that shape the urban systems and built environment that form our cities. The course will teach students how to analyze and transform urban environments to create livable and sustainable cities for future generations. The course will also contribute a design perspective for the program: project based, empirical, iterative, situated, and integrative. The course uses New York City as a real-world laboratory and augments foundational and theoretical examples with case studies of successful and unsuccessful initiatives. Students will develop projects that address urgent urban challenges such as sustainability, infrastructure, resiliency, mobility, affordability, access, and equity and will propose forward-thinking and technologically driven design approaches to urban challenges.