Downtown Los Angeles (DTLA) is emblematic of contemporary urban design’s complexity and opportunity. How can an existing district be redesigned, adapted, and developed for today and tomorrow?

Amid an expanse of dingbat apartments and strip malls, downtown Los Angeles is a paradox: a dense icon for a city it largely does not resemble. Yet DTLA is where the city gathers, celebrates, and drives economic development, with offices, hotels, schools, museums, dining, and roughly 90,000 residents drawn there over the past generation. The pandemic shifted everything and never fully stopped: office oversupply left real estate vulnerable, and declining public health and safety have made downtown less inviting as reasons to return grow.

Acting as a single urban design team, the studio focuses on urban production at a moment when physical change faces social, political, and financial headwinds, requiring treating what we design and how we make it happen as one problem. City in a City asks what DTLA could become right now, in a few years, and across a generation, addressing five interlocking conditions: office vacancy and adaptive reuse, public realm quality, public health and safety, new construction, and connectivity.

Proposals will be full spatial propositions: a building, a landscape, a street, an interior, or a specific product that increases attraction and interconnectivity in the district. Proposals reckon honestly with why conditions persist and what improvement costs in financial, political, and social capital. They should also be visionary, demonstrating how tomorrow’s downtown can be more attractive than today’s.

The studio runs in two phases. Site investigation features mapping and policy research ahead of a visit to Los Angeles. Students pitch initial interventions, then test them in the field by meeting directly with business improvement districts, policymakers, community organizations, residents, business coalitions, designers, and developers, and by observing how DTLA’s districts behave across conditions.

Back in Cambridge, students develop full spatial proposals individually or in teams, depending on the scale of the intervention. Each proposal stands on its own, while aggregating into a unified strategic plan for the district. Feedback from studio partners continues through the semester, culminating in a final review and a public-facing report shared with the city and community.

Each design proposal is developed to a high level of visual and conceptual articulation. Work is judged on three legs of urban production: design (a clear vision and form for the intervention), strategy (a near- and long-term plan for advancing it), and mechanism (how it is initiated, financed, and sustained). Given real capital scarcity, students must address market logic directly. This doesn’t mean maximizing financial return but rather justifying the intervention’s cost in terms of social, cultural, and environmental gains. The studio is solution-oriented, and proposals are judged on what they can build, not on how well they describe the problem.

Open to students in Urban Design, Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning. Given the studio’s site-based, design-driven pace, students should be prepared to work with a high degree of agency, spatial command, and creative judgment from the outset.

This studio is supported by the Los Angeles Headquarters Association, Building Owners and Managers Association Greater Los Angeles, the DTLA Alliance, and the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.