SCI-Arc EDGE, Design of Cities is a one-year, three-semester postgraduate degree program prompting students to investigate the full scope and substance of contemporary urbanization. The program is driven by the understanding that some of the most urgent and complex design problems of the twenty-first century concern the necessity for a fundamental change in the organization and design of urban mechanisms and infrastructures.

AN EVOLVING DISCIPLINE

Virtually all the world’s population, human and otherwise, is swept up in an array of processes of environmental transformation linked to urban growth. The interactions of these processes, and the extent to which they intervene in all spheres of planetary life, require new operative concepts and methods for urban design.

Urban design has over the past century operated as a compromised practice caught between the bureaucratic apparatus of urban planning and the object-oriented aspirations of architectural design. A lack of critical reflexivity concerning its assumptions and objectives has left the discipline with methodologies that are either underarticulated or overdetermined and often outright obsolete. The Design of Cities program undertakes to clarify the mission of urban design by foregrounding research and critical and hypothetical thinking as the keys to practice.

ACCOUNTABLE SYSTEMS

Design of Cities extends architectural thinking to the twenty-first-century city and related domains. The program takes an expansive and experimental approach to the territories and technologies of urban design in the twenty-first century, from the physical place to the digital platform, from the local to the metropolitan to the planetary scale. This includes the various footprints that become evident as expressions of existence: from biosignatures of early lifeforms to signs left by ancient or prehistoric societies, to carbon footprints of industrial and post-industrial economies, to digital footprints remaining from our activities online. Building on the premise that new urban imaginaries, constituencies, and economies can emerge from feedback loops between innovative research and design, the program seeks to add receptiveness and adaptability to a constantly evolving discipline. By equipping students to speculate on viable futures of the urbanized world, it guides them to formulate relevant conceptions of the urban, deployable today.