This seminar investigates the complex nature of 'successful' urban design, and attempts to identify and evaluate examples of urban design that are at the leading edge of practice -- anticipating the future. The seminar will also deal with two parallel questions: What are the key trends that will shape the form and function of future cities, and how will these changes affect the role of the urban designer?

The first part of the seminar focuses on the present. We will survey the landscape of contemporary urban design practice, with the intent of categorizing major approaches and orientations, while also identifying the range of urban design problems that seem to require new architectural programs and planning processes. If urban design may be defined as the process of giving physical design direction to the growth and conservation of cities, suburbs and regions, it must be seen as far more than and aesthetic phenomenon; it is also a social and political product of a culture. The task of the urban designer is to build places that are successful across multiple dimensions simultaneously: physical, social, financial, political, and aesthetic. To gauge the complexity of evaluating urban design quality and to culminate the first month of the seminar, participants will compare the selection process and results of two awards programs that deal centrally with urban design: Progressive Architecture Awards for urban design and the Rudy Bruner Award for Excellence in the Urban Environment.

The second part of the semester will consider the future. Each session will focus on a key topic, or trend that is affecting the organization and form of cities. A member of the urban design faculty will introduce the trend and present one or two representative case projects that may arguably be considered 'of the future'. At each session, seminar participants will respond to the presentation, introducing examples and counter examples intended to call into question whether the trend and cases seem indicative of the future or not. Our collective challenge will be to identify the trajectory of cities and city design from both physical and social perspectives. The themes and cases to be discussed (selected in consultation with MIT's urban design faculty) represent four major venues where change is now challenging conventional notions of urban design.