Elements of the Urban Stack: Activating Design Agency in a Complex World

The Urban Stack is a practical and pedagogical framework for understanding the infrastructures of power that influence design practice today. The elements of the Urban Stack are the externalities that shape the design and production of the built environment — namely finance, technology, and policy — as well as the nature of contemporary practice itself. The course addresses the practical opportunities and challenges for design as it inevitably confronts, interacts with, and even shapes these elements in a time of increasing uncertainty, project complexity, and the collective risk of social and environmental crises.

The course is designed to explore, translate, and generate alternative readings of our built context: to “re-see” urban form through the lens of finance, technology, and policy. We will also examine how design practice can amplify its capacity as an agent of positive change in shaping the environmental, social, cultural, and experiential qualities of urban form within our emerging 21st-century context. A primary objective of the course is to identify gaps and opportunities in the layered socio-technical systems that guide the production of the contemporary built environment; and to leverage these gaps to enable culturally and socially transformative design and development.  

Theoretical frameworks will be presented to help us seek space for design impact through established and emerging modes of practice and projects that operate upon, within, or against the elements of the Urban Stack as systemic constructs. This year, we will examine the housing design ecosystem to ground course content in practical and applied cases that wrestle with the balance of cultural, social, and environmental concerns; and that operate between the levels of project design and systems intervention.

Our task is to collectively answer the following questions: Where does our agency as designers of the built environment lie in current practice? As urban projects grow in complexity, swelling and speeding up to attain maximum impact, is our work inevitably defined and shaped by the pressures of finance, automation, and regulation?  

The course format will balance lectures and panels of guest practitioners with collaborative cross-disciplinary research, analysis, discussion, and position formation around course topics. PRO-7445 is intended to bring together students across disciplines and degrees. The format of the class is aimed at interdisciplinary collaboration and novel investigation of the topics at hand. The discourse-heavy course format favors participation. There are no costs beyond tuition associated with this course. 
 

The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 3rd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Monday, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 3rd. It will meet regularly thereafter.