“From Pipeline to Platform: Imagining Innovation in the Rust Belt” by by Alex Yuen (MAUD '18), recipient of Urban Planning and Design Thesis Prize in Urban Design.
It was at Harvard University that the first formal North American programs in city and regional planning (1923) and urban design (1960) were established. Since then, Harvard has played a leading role in the education of urban planners and urban designers. The Department of Urban Planning and Design is home to both professions, offering a professional degree in urban planning and a post-professional degree in urban design. More
The program leading to the Master of Architecture in Urban Design is intended for individuals who have completed a professional program in Architecture and who have a strong interest in engaging the practice and theory of contemporary urbanism.
The program leading to the Master of Landscape Architecture in Urban Design is intended for individuals who have completed a professional program in Landscape Architecture and who have a strong interest in engaging the practice and theory of contemporary urbanism.
Accredited by the Planning Accreditation Board and open to students with an undergraduate degree, the two-year professional Master in Urban Planning degree program emphasizes planning to develop, preserve, and enhance the built environment. Students learn how to understand, analyze, and influence the variety of forces-social, economic, cultural, legal, political, ecological, and aesthetic, among others-shaping the built environment.
Students in the Master in Urban Planning (MUP) program can undertake concurrent degrees with other departments at the GSD and joint degrees with certain schools outside the GSD. Concurrent and joint degree students must be in full-time residence for at least one additional year beyond the longer of the two degree programs.
Composed of internationally experienced scholars and practitioners, the Department’s faculty explores the built environment from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and points of view. The Department’s pedagogically innovative combination of interdisciplinary studios, lecture courses, seminars, and independent study, coupled with a relatively small student size of roughly 100 individuals drawn from around the world, creates an intimate, engaged educational atmosphere in which students thrive and learn.
Students take full advantage of the curricular and extracurricular offerings of the GSD’s other departments of landscape architecture and architecture. The Department also draws upon the significant resources of Harvard University as a whole. Two professorships are shared with the Kennedy School of Government and the Urban Planning program administers a joint degree program with the Law School and the Kennedy School. Students often cross-register in courses offered by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Kennedy School, the Business School, the Law School, and the School of Public Health. Students also cross-register in courses offered by the neighboring Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Diane Davis, Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design
Please visit the official Urban Planning and Design Facebook page.
In 2017, Friends of the High Line were awarded the Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design. The exhibition celebrating this award aims to re-create the spatial and rhythmic experience of walking along the High Line, where billboards and buildings frame and re-frame elevated perceptions of the city. Here the physical and process-oriented…
Rose Florian Rodriguez (MAUD ’18) describes her final project for the option studio…
The American Planning Association (APA), together with the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, has named…
by Evan Shieh (MAUD '19) The proposed design methodology in this project examines form‐based code…
The Future of Streets (FoS) research project at the Harvard Graduate School of Design's City…
The Spring 2018 option studio “Extreme Urbanism V: Exploring Hybrid Housing Typologies, Elphinstone State”…
Harvard Graduate School of Design student Gina Ciancone (MUP '19) and a cross-Harvard team have won…
We caught up with Abby Spinak, lecturer in urban planning and design, to discuss the courses she…
“Reconceptualizing the Urban” is the title of a four-year investigation of urban studies undertaken by…
by Colleen Brady (MUP '18) — Recipient of Urban Planning and Design Thesis Prize in Urban…
Imagine that the issues of race, income, education and unemployment inequality, and the resulting segregation, isolation and fear, could be addressed by designing for greater access, agency, ownership, beauty or empowerment. Now imagine the Just City — the cities, neighborhoods and public spaces where all…
Alex Yuen (MAUD '18) describes his final project for the option studio “$2,000…