Urban Design Studio III

Urban Design Studio III investigates the process of urbanization in a global context, examining sites facing substantive structural and social change including, most recently, Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, Accra, Bucharest, and Medellin. Studio research moves beyond the legacy of urbanism characterized by city and countryside, urban and rural, or city and suburb as discrete binaries and instead frames urbanism as a continuously shifting assembly of socio-natural systems. In particular, the studio focuses on the water-energy-food nexus in which spatial dynamics are inseparable from the uneven effects of climate change, landscape and ecological degradation, destabilization of housing systems, threats to public health, challenges to work patterns, and the transformation of mobility. Students explore the operative potential of multi-scalar, ecological frameworks for designing robust urbanized landscapes and public spaces.

The studio is organized with the intensive participation of local partners, from city governments and planning departments, to humanitarian groups, local universities and community groups. The studio builds on Columbia University’s resources via the Columbia Global Centers program and the Columbia GSAPP Studio X program, each with staff and facilities around the globe. The Studio produces exhibitions and public events with project partners and, as the final studio in the Urban Design sequence, students organize a publication documenting process, partnership findings and design proposals.