Metropolitan regions are shaped by the interaction of infrastructure, governance, investment, environmental systems, mobility networks, public space, and evolving patterns of everyday life. Yet urban interventions are often conceived through fragmented approaches, where urban systems are planned in isolation, separating mobility from land use, public space from economic development, and spatial design from governance and implementation. This studio explores how metropolitan transformation can emerge through integrated approaches that connect systems, spatial design, governance, and value creation.

Lima provides a unique context for this exploration. As a coastal desert metropolis framed by the Pacific Ocean and the Andes, and home to more than 11 million people, Lima is Peru’s political, economic, cultural (with both millennia-old and colonial heritage), and gastronomic capital, as well as one of Latin America’s leading tourism destinations. The studio focuses on Lima’s evolving metropolitan centralities, where new mobility infrastructure, changing patterns of work and investment, the emergence of mixed-use urban environments, and growing ambitions for high-quality public spaces, sustainability, and urban livability are reshaping the metropolitan core. At the same time, these opportunities unfold within a broader metropolitan context marked by chronic traffic congestion, spatial fragmentation, and unequal access to urban opportunities, raising important questions about how growth, investment, and design can contribute to more connected, resilient, productive, and inclusive metropolitan futures.

Working across the disciplines of urban design and planning, students will explore metropolitan transformation through interconnected systems, including mobility and connectivity systems, public realm and urban activation systems, metropolitan centralities and urban value systems, ecological and landscape systems, innovation and economic development systems, and human experience systems. Through readings spanning fiction, non-fiction, and urban scholarship, lectures, discussions, mapping, precedent analysis, guest speakers, stakeholder engagement, and field observations, students will develop proposals that integrate design thinking with governance and implementation strategies across multiple urban scales.

Students will work in pairs to produce analytical maps, systems diagrams, design proposals, physical and/or digital models, governance and implementation strategies, and an integrated vision for metropolitan transformation. Final projects will demonstrate how integrated urban interventions can contribute to long-term metropolitan transformation while generating spatial, environmental, social, institutional, and economic values.

Student work will be evaluated on the rigor of research and analysis, the originality and quality of design proposals, the integration of systems thinking across scales, the ability to connect design with governance and implementation, the clarity of communication, and active participation throughout the semester.

The studio is intended primarily for students in Urban Design and Urban Planning and welcomes students from Landscape Architecture, and related disciplines interested in metropolitan transformation, systems thinking, and interdisciplinary approaches to shaping cities.