Overview
"After thousands of years of a world population that was almost exclusively rural and hundreds of years of one that was predominantly rural, half of the people of the world now live in urban areas. At this historic moment in civilization—the urban/rural equinox—it behooves us to better understand, plan, design, and build cities."
Douglas Kelbaugh FAIA, Dean
Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning
"Our lives now are lived at the metropolitan scale. We no longer live in isolated villages, neighborhoods or even singular cities... How neighborhoods, districts, and urban centers fit together is as important as the urban design of a block or building."
Peter Calthorpe
Michigan Debates on Urbanism
"There is a specificity and a meaning to the American environment for better or worse and we need to focus on it: suburbia, in-between areas, everyday space or whatever you want to call it. All those strip malls and parking lots are our environment and we need to engage with them in a productive way."
Margaret Crawford
Michigan Debates on Urbanism
"The interesting problem for this country is not what you do with New Yorks, Chicagos, etc., but what you do with the Tulsas, Kansas Cities, the Detroits, the St. Louis's where postwar growth has not been sustained and the cities have emptied out."
Peter Eisenman
Michigan Debates on Urbanism
"As the United States confronts the environmental implications of its late-20th century anti-urbanism, now is an opportune time for urban designers to re-assert the primacy of the city—and its sustainable development in other parts of the world."
Roy Strickland, Director
Taubman College Urban Design Program
"We need to develop a new vocabulary to talk about the city."
Lars Lerup, 2004 Eliel Saarinan Visiting Professor
Michigan Debates on Urbanism
In light of challenges like the ones outlined above, the practice of urban design is increasingly important in the United States and across the globe. Urban designers give shape and form to city blocks, districts, and metropolitan areas, articulating urban plans in three dimensions and establishing the rules, guidelines, and frameworks for architects and developers to follow. Occupying a central role in the development and redevelopment of cities, urban designers draw simultaneously on the analysis and policy roles of urban planners and the form-giving aspects of architects. They engage the totality of design, including landscape architecture and urban planning, and serve as the critical, catalytic link across disciplines and professions.
The University of Michigan's Master of Urban Design Program relishes the challenges of and opportunities for designing cities. With cross-cutting concern for place, culture, economics, history, and theory, the program capitalizes on the global experience of faculty and students to prepare graduates to be leaders in shaping urban environments across the world. The program is intense, studio-focused, and far-reaching, emphasizing travel, reading, and design projects that engage metropolitan areas such as New York, Chicago, Detroit, Portland, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and with an international study option extending to countries such as India, Italy, Ghana, China, and Germany. The global city, the post-industrial city, the town, and suburban sprawl are all subjects for study and design, taking advantage of the program's location in one of the most diverse urban regions in the heartland of the United States. The University is 30 minutes from Detroit-Metro Airport, international hub with direct flights to Europe, Asia, and South America, and offers some of the most extensive international study opportunities anywhere.
Students in the program, who have come from North and South America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and Asia, are prepared to practice urban design with the capacities to:
- analyze urbanism in any location with appreciation for the nuances of place, culture, and ecology
- design cities based on this analysis and with concern for environmental sustainability, economics, geo-politics, and social equity
- work collaboratively with urban planners, landscape architects, architects, public officials, and real estate developers
- communicate ideas in clear and compelling ways—visually, orally, and in writing—as is demanded by the urban designer's public role.
These capacities are developed in a rigorous sequence of studios that are integrated with academic courses in urban design theory, history, methodology, and practice, as well as real estate development. Students further enrich their preparation through the program's elective or by taking the international study option.