For students in Berkeley’s Master of Urban Design Program, the cities of the San Francisco Bay Area offer an extensive urban design laboratory. However, to balance our emphasis on local and regional urban design issues, faculty organizes design workshops abroad. Through intensive two-week work programs, urban design students and faculty travel abroad and have the opportunity to work jointly with faculty and students from host universities. In past years such workshops have taken place in Italy, France, Mexico, Japan, and India. Lately, workshops have focused on the rapid urbanization and environmental conditions in Asia, primarily Vietnam, Thailand, and China.

Dadun, a water village of 3,500 inhabitants in the Pearl River Delta that will become part of the new Civic Center of Foshan, a city of five million people.

In January 2008 faculty and students from the Master of Urban Design Program, together with Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning students, stayed on the campus at the South China University of Technology (SCUT) in Guangzhou and worked on the future of a historic water village in the Pearl River Delta. For example, Dadun, a village and marketplace that had reached wealth through silk production, will now be absorbed into the rapidly growing City of Foshan.

John Sugrue with the Urban Morphology Team.

In March of 2008, a team from Berkeley’s Master of Urban Design Program joined students from Tokyo’s Waseda University and students from the University of Ferrara, Italy, for a two-week workshop at ZheJiang University in Hangzhou, near Shanghai. Hangzhou is located at the terminus of the Grand Canal of China, an 1,800-kilometer-long waterway that connects Beijing in the north with the Yangtze River Delta in the center of China. The canal was completed during the Sui Dynasty (581-618), and with the invention of the water level adjusting pound lock in the 10th century the Grand Canal became China’s most important economic, cultural, and political north–south connection. Sections of the canal are still actively used for water-based transport. The workshop focused on the changes in land use alongside the canal from the formerly industrial areas to residential and recreational activities. At the same time, student teams worked on designs that reversed environmental degradation and made improvements to water quality and urban ecology.

Berkeley urban design students in Hangzhou.

During the summer of 2008 two urban design students will join a four-week design workshop at Cergy Pontoise near Paris to work on infrastructure design in the Isle de France.

For information about the international urban design workshop program, please contact Professor Peter Bosselmann at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it