The Living City: Introduction to Urban Design, Landscape, and Ecology New

How do we design a city? 

Cities are more than collections of buildings. Streets, parks, waterways, vegetation, infrastructure, public spaces, and human activity all interact to produce the environments we inhabit. The Living City introduces students to urban design, landscape architecture, and territorial ecology by approaching the city as an interconnected and continually changing system.

Using New York City as both classroom and laboratory, students will learn to observe the city at multiple scales: from the body and the street to the block, neighborhood, landscape, and territory.  Where do people gather? Why are some streets hotter than others? Where does rainwater go? What happens in the spaces between buildings?

Through drawing, photography, mapping, collage, physical models, field observation, short readings, precedent studies, and design exercises, students will learn how designers make visible relationships that are often difficult to see. Environmental systems such as water, heat, vegetation, soil, and weather will be considered alongside circulation, accessibility, infrastructure, maintenance, social activity, and patterns of occupation.

The course progresses from reading the city, to mapping urban and ecological relationships, to designing an intervention within a real New York City site. 

The final project asks each student to develop a site-specific urban proposal that brings together architecture, landscape, ecology, and public life. Projects might transform a street, threshold, vacant space, waterfront condition, public landscape, infrastructural edge, or other overlooked urban condition. Students will communicate their proposals through maps, drawings, sections, diagrams, models, and a final visual narrative.

The goal is to introduce the students to ways of seeing, analyzing, and imagining the city. By the end of the course, students will understand urban design as an interdisciplinary practice and will have developed a portfolio-ready project demonstrating research, spatial thinking, environmental awareness, and design experimentation.