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 future regenerative urban design scenarios for Caribbean coastal communities that weaves together social, ecological and policy/government imperatives. What does urban design mean on a hotter earth, in a globalized context where those most vulnerable to earth systems collapse are the least to blame? How can we approach the concept of resilience critically and in light of centuries of extraction, but also offer bold ideas for the future? How does the right to housing and the prerogative to invest in next century urban infrastructure intersect with the need to rebuild ecosystems, fisheries, forests ? How has a legacy of colonization and extraction led to climate risk? What is the role of urban design to catalyze resilient pathways forward in short term and long-term scenarios 2100 ?

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.