First Semester Core Urban Planning Studio introduces students to the fundamental knowledge and technical skills used by urban planners to investigate, analyze, create, and implement plans and projects.

In this studio, Boston provides the location for developing skills and strategies to address and understand the local in its wider context. In planning the local area is of great importance and planners need to engage the particularities of districts, neighborhoods, towns, cities, and regions.

Planners also understand and engage the wider context of places–in terms of physical scale, historical development, built character, social groupings, political structures, environmental attributes, economic activities, and future possibilities.

The course focuses on key challenges of contemporary urban planning. The question of how planning can help make places more just and equitable is an enduring and foundational concern in planning. Towns and cities can help people gain access to nearby resources such as jobs, services, and cultural opportunities. For decades if not centuries, technological developments have expanded questions of access beyond the physical domain, a condition which seems to continually accelerate. The cross-cutting issues of equity and access will inform many aspects of the work throughout the semester.

Major projects will engage with the challenges of affordability and climate change. Planners have had a longstanding concern with the effects of wealth and income inequality. While some elements of planning have accentuated growth dynamics that exacerbate inequality, other elements have played an active role in mitigating those effects, facilitating affordability and channeling the benefits of planning toward community well-being. Similarly, environmental planning has been a longstanding concern in the field. With accelerating climate disruptions, this concern has been evolving from a niche to the mainstream, where mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to impacts of climate change infuse many other domains of planning from housing, to transportation, to economic development.

There are no easy answers; the critical and creative skills of the urban planner are being called upon now more than ever to advance the notion of a just and sustainable society.

Planners address messy situations where the problems are disputed and the solutions contested. They identify issues, gather and analyze information, listen to opinions, draw on precedents, raise ethical concerns, and consider the future. They figure out the important questions to answer, engage stakeholders, propose strategies, communicate ideas, and create and revise proposals. In this studio students gain experience engaging with complex and unclear situations in ways that can lead toward plausible and ethical approaches to addressing them.

The studio teaching approach is one of creating a setting for producing learning rather than delivering instruction about exactly what you should do. The process is collaborative and iterative. This can be a bit uncomfortable at first, but it is a low-risk environment. The assignments take you through a sequence of exercises that include reflection, analysis, proposal-making, and implementation while also addressing challenges (equity, access, affordability and climate). These occur at different scales and require both individual and group work.

Students also experiment with how to effectively communicate with others using different visual, oral, and written techniques and media in pinups, slides, posters, and presentations.