Extreme Urbanisms II: Speculations and Alternative Futures for the Mumbai Metropolitan Region

The studio will engage with the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) as its site for enquiry, research, and design propositions. The pedagogical thrust of the studio is to explore the potential for urban design and planning as well as landscape, architecture, and real estate as instruments for spatial imaginations at the metropolitan scale. This studio will be the first of a three-year thematic exploration of the Mumbai region which will range from looking at infrastructure and ecology, to questions of housing, urban systems and form. The studio will have both research and design components that will focus on a menu of predetermined questions with regional implications. Project formulation will be an important component of the studio. The studio will explore issues of extreme urbanism in the form of social, cultural, and economic disparities and how these manifest themselves in the MMR. Social interactions, public space and the broader issue of how design and planning can facilitate new imaginations for the metropolitan region will be central to the discussions. The intent will be to evolve new understandings of the contemporary potential of the MMR and to position urban design and planning as well as landscape, architecture, and real estate as instruments for a broader strategy plan that is more nuanced in terms of the ecologies that it recognizes and socially inclusive in its propositionary dimension. The studio is open to all departments at the GSD, and will collaborate with the Loeb Fellowship and MDesS programs as well as students and faculty from Harvard Business School, Harvard Kennedy School, and Harvard Law School.