Urban Design Studio

The Five Borough Studio

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.

Studio pedagogy treats “site” not as a given but as a value-laden construct that embodies multiple motives shaping the process and products of Urban Design. Over the course of the semester, the students explore methods of representing urban sites and their multi-scalar, multivalent systemic linkages beyond normative borders. Urban Designers must identify and investigate complex, layered contexts, within which urban places are embedded. Like site, “program” is constructed, and offers opportunities to expand the field of human interaction. Studio research is framed around urban operations, actions and claims, all of which encourage students to investigate the layers of public systems integral to constructing a transformative urban environment. Understanding Urban Design’s primary concern as serving many publics, students develop speculative hypotheses addressing the needs of a variety of stakeholders at different scales, through site-specific designs for a particular neighborhoods, across New York City’s five Boroughs.