| MLA/MCP Urban Design Focus |
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Urban design is the art of shaping urban environments over time, of giving form to ecologically appropriate neighborhoods and cities, as well as creating environments that are educative and just. It is concerned with managing the experiential quality of cities: how communities look, how they feel, and how they work for the people who use them. Design is a key, operative word: urban designers do design urban physical environments. Professor Kevin Lynch of MIT, an internationally honored planner and one of the leaders in the field in the 1960s and 1970s, defined urban design (which he preferred to call city design) as follows: “I think of what I call city design as skill in creating proposals for the form and management of the extended spatial and temporal environment, judging it particularly for its effects on the everyday lives of its inhabitants, and seeking to enhance their daily experience and their development as persons.... It deals primarily with people acting and perceiving in the sensuous, four-dimensional physical environment, and yet it is familiar with all we have learned about institutions, process, and social consequences, during planning’s Long March from its original base in land use control.” [City Design: What It Is and How It Might Be Taught (1980), in City Sense and City Design: Writings and Projects of Kevin Lynch, Tridib Banerjee and Michael Southworth, eds., MIT Press, 1990] The main aims of this concentration are design and planning of the physical environment in ways that best respond to people's needs, values and aspirations. Urban designers create alternatives for the form, use, and management of the large scale urban environment. They draw upon city planning, architecture, landscape architecture, history, and the social sciences for their theory and methods. Work ranges in scale from design for small public spaces or streets, to neighborhoods, citywide systems, or whole regions. Because urban designers work for the public in one way or another, they must have an understanding of the physical form implications of social, legal, and economic policies. Students concentrating in urban design are expected to have some design background—typically an approved undergraduate or graduate degree in architecture, landscape architecture, environmental design, or urban planning with a design emphasis. Exceptions are possible but are limited in number; admission in such cases requires the student to spend additional time to become proficient in design fundamentals related to the concentration. Graduates in this field work with public agencies, largely at the local governmental scale, but also with institutions of government at larger scales whose responsibilities include design issues. They work as well with private architectural, landscape, city planning, and community development firms whose clients are both public and private. Coursework in this field focuses on studio work. It also includes intermediate and advanced work in theory, history, survey and measurement skills, and implementation tools related to urban physical form, as well as development of individual interests in the field. Emphasis is on work done in small groups and in close association with faculty members. The curriculum is aimed at developing skills in:
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