This Site Planning practicum coincides with the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina—a pivotal moment for New Orleans and for MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP). Over the past two decades, DUSP faculty, students, and alumni have supported the city’s recovery and resilience efforts through long-term partnerships and planning initiatives.

The studio will re-engage with New Orleans through the lens of corridor-scale resilience, focusing on how underrecognized neighborhood/commercial corridors can adapt to climate and social challenges such as heat, flooding, and energy vulnerability. Students will develop Corridor Resilience Action Plans for three areas, building on the 2016 New Orleans Main Street Resilience Plan, while exploring neighborhood connectivity and how urban design, equity, and identity intersect. 

Focuses on the synthesis of urban, mixed-use real estate projects, including the integration of physical design and programming with finance and marketing. Interdisciplinary student teams analyze how to maximize value across multiple dimensions in the process of preparing professional development proposals for sites in US cities and internationally. Reviews emerging real estate products and innovative developments to provide a foundation for studio work. Two major projects are interspersed with lectures and field trips. Integrates skills and knowledge in the MSRED program; also open to other students interested in real estate development by permission of the instructors.

Examines ways that urban design contributes to distribution of political power and resources in cities. Investigates the nature of relations between built form and political purposes through close study of public and private sector design commissions and planning processes that have been clearly motivated by political pressures, as well as more tacit examples. Lectures and discussions focus on cases from both developed and developing countries.

Students continue to work in their venture teams to advance innovative ideas, products, and services oriented to design, planning, and the human environment. Presented in a workshop format with supplementary lectures. Teams are matched with external mentors for additional support in business and product development. At the end of the term, teams pitch their ventures to an audience from across the school and MIT, investors, industry, and cities. Registration limited to students accepted to the MITdesignX accelerator in the fall.

Examines innovations in urban design practice occurring through the work of leading practitioners in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning. Features lectures by major national and global practitioners in urban design. Projects and topics vary based on term and speakers but may cover architectural urbanism, landscape and ecology, arts and culture, urban design regulation and planning agencies, and citywide and regional design. Focuses on analysis and synthesis of themes discussed in presentations and discussions.

Weds the theory and practice of city design and planning as a means of adaptation with the insights of ecology and other environmental disciplines. Presents ecological urbanism as critical to the future of the city and its design, as it provides a framework for addressing challenges that threaten humanity — such as climate change, rising sea level, and environmental and social justice — while fulfilling human needs for health, safety, welfare, meaning, and delight. Applies a historical and theoretical perspective to the solution of real-world challenges.

1/30/26 note: Schedule and room change to R 9-12 in 9-450A

Utopias, Camps, and the Architecture of War, is proposed as a design-research workshop that examines the layered histories of Terezín as a way to think critically about how architecture participates in the making of trauma, memory, and recovery. Conceived as a fortified utopian city and later transformed into a Nazi transport camp, Terezín embodies the shifting functions of urban space and architecture as both agent and witness. Its bastions, mounds, and urban fabric are not merely remnants but active carriers of political and historical meaning. By tracing the trajectory from fortification to camp, from architecture of war to the ongoing dilemmas of inhabitation, memorialization, restoration and reconstruction, this workshop foregrounds the ethical and epistemological challenges of engaging with sites where architecture itself was complicit in violence.

The studio is offered as collaborative project together with confirmed participating architecture schools: Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic (lead by Veronika Sindlerova); TU Dresden, Germany (lead by Angela Mensing-de Jong); Technion -Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel (lead by Eliyahu Keller, Aaron Sprecher). Pending on funding, students should be prepared to travel to the Czech Republic and Germany during spring break.

Note for MArch students: Serves as an Urbanism elective

Class meets in-person every spring term.

Program of thesis research leading to the writing of an SB thesis. Intended for seniors. Twelve units recommended.

Note: Schedule change from W 9-12 to W 2-5 in room E14-251 (11/21/25)

This hands-on studio investigates how artistic, architectural and historiological methodologies can shape ecological and civic systems through the collaborative adaptation and construction of two mobile, site-specific chicken coops. Cross listed and co-taught with Nida Sinnokrot (ACT 4.s32 and Kate Brown (STS- STS.20), the course connects critical histories of urban farming in Boston with practical skills in community-responsive design and fabrication. Students will work to develop adaptive proposals for Eastie Farms and Common Good Farm that merge form, function, and narrative, while interrogating how food systems, civic infrastructures, and public space can be reimagined through creative, operational aesthetics.

This workshop represents the second part of Resilient Urbanism, a joint commitment with a community partner to envision and reimagine architectural infrastructure to support Common Good Coop a local community owned urban farm organization in the heart of Dorchester. Previously, students explored ideas pertaining to collective ownership structures, urban agricultural histories, the history of racial segregation in Boston. The outcomes produced a colorful, accessible zine documenting how a reader would navigate municipal code and regulation to start a community garden or urban farm along with a larger design proposal for the land in which the Co-Op occupies.

Undergraduates welcome.

Note for MArch students: Serves as an Urbanism elective