The Urban Design Program is a three-semester degree in the multidisciplinary study of cities, regions, infrastructures, and ecosystems. The program focuses on the city as an agent of resilient change and on the role of design in redefining the twenty-first century urban landscape, advancing new paradigms of research, practice, and pedagogy to meet the challenges of climate change, rapid urbanization, and social inequality. Students and faculty in the MSAUD program work to integrate and underscore the essential links between public space, social justice, and ecological systems. The program asks the venerable and necessarily shifting question: what is “the good city?”— reframing the city not as a fixed, delimited territory but as a gradient of varied landscapes supported by uneven networks of food, energy, resources, culture, transportation, and capital.
The MSAUD program is open to both pre- and post-professional students, and encourages applications from a range of backgrounds yet focused on the questions and possibilities of the changing field of urban design. All applicants must have an undergraduate degree from an accredited college or university by the time they start the M.S. AUD program. Please note that the MSAUD is not a professional architecture degree and does not in itself qualify for licensure.
The MSAUD program is a designated STEM program eligible under the CIP (Classification of Instructional Programs) Code 04.0902: Architectural and Building Sciences/Technology. Learn more about STEM designation.
The Urban Design program’s curriculum balances the need for shared and specialized knowledge with individual student research interests. The core of the program is the three-semester sequence of studios.
Summer Studio I is foundational and addresses the experimental, representational, and constructive aspects of urban design as a process. The studio frames the Five Boroughs of New York City as a learning lab, an aggregate of socio-spatial tensions, an archive of biophysical infrastructures, and an evolving set of lived experiences.
Fall Studio II expands in scope to consider the city-region, examining large scale interdependencies, interactions, and conflicts. Studio research addresses the particular conditions of American city-regions (previously, the Hudson Valley, currently the Atlanta region) in which shifting ecological, infrastructural, financial, racial, and social conditions call for new strategies for action.
Spring Studio III takes on problems of global urbanization, extending previous studio work to include the challenges and scales of the climate emergency, examining physical and social infrastructures, new visions of programmatic intervention, and robust community, governmental and NGO partnerships. The studio typically travels to two cities, working in close cooperation with local partners and organizations.
Professor Kate Orff, Urban Design Program Director and principal of Scape, discusses rewilding on the At a Distance podcast as one tool among many for restoring ecological infrastructure, oysters as engineering assistants in preventing coastal flooding, and other out-of-the-box solutions local and federal authorities should be considering before the next hurricane hits.
Listen to more podcasts from the Urban Design program by following UD Sessions: The Expanded Field of Urban Design, a series of conversations with urban designers around the globe, who graduated from or taught at GSAPP’s Urban Design program. By discussing their current work and reflecting on how their experience at GSAPP shaped their thinking about design, cities, and politics, the series explores the ways in which the field of urban design expanded since its emergence. Hosted by Faculty Kaja Kühl and Grahame Shane.
Course | Semester | Title | Student Work | Instructor | Syllabus | Requirements & Sequence | Location & Time | Session & Points | Call No. |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
A4528‑1 | Summer 2024 |
Digital Techniques
|
Adriana Chavez, Chris Landau, Donnal Baijnauth |
114 AVERY
F 1 PM - 4 PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
11759 | |||
A4685‑1 | Summer 2024 |
Urban Theory + Design in Post Industrial Age
|
Noah Chasin, Joseph Huennekens, Pedro Leonardo Ramos Pastrana |
114 AVERY + 408, 409, 412 for DISC.
W 10 AM - 12 PM | DISCUSSION SESSIONS 12:30-1:30, 1:30 - 2:30
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
11760 | |||
A6824‑1 | Summer 2024 |
Reading NY Urbanism
|
Justin Davidson, Jesse Hirakawa |
114 AVERY
TU 11 AM - 1PM
|
3 Points
|
11761 | |||
A6849‑1 | Summer 2024 |
Urban Design Studio 1
|
Nans Voron, Sagi Golan, Sean Gallagher, Daphne Lundi, Grant McCracken, Austin Sakong, Ankita Chachra, Mario Ulloa |
TBA
M + TH 3 PM - 8 PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
9 Points
|
11762 | |||
A6900 | Summer 2024 |
Research I
|
Danielle Smoller |
2 or 3 Points
|
11757 |