Master of Urban Design
Overview
The Master of Urban Design (MUD) is an intensive, one-year, interdisciplinary post-professional degree program intended for talented persons already holding a professional degree in architecture, landscape architecture or urban and regional planning (e.g. BArch, BLA, MArch, MLA, MURP/MUP).
Field
Urban design is an integrative activity focused on creating beautiful, vital, functional, environmentally sustainable, and socially just public places. By contextualizing architecture while providing a means of implementation for planners and landscape architects, urban design occupies a realm supportive of these fields while simultaneously generating its own responses to the most pressing urban issues. Although urban designers often intervene on the neighborhood scale, the program fosters mastery of inclusive and participatory community design processes and the attendant means for effectively implementing physical plans at the metropolitan, neighborhood, district, corridor, street and block scale.
As economic and environmental ills become increasingly acute, urban designers are assuming a leading role in the production of a more sustainable urbanism. The field is ideally positioned within this movement as it moves beyond individual architectural solutions to focus on shaping broader human settlement patterns. More and more, urban designers are taking a proactive role in constructing regulations influencing future development.
Focus
The MUD program focuses on creating sustainable urban infrastructure and interprets the city as a set of overlaid and integrated systems. The program views urban designers playing a vital role in the production of the built environment, because of their dual responsibility to illustrate preferable design solutions and shape the regulatory patterns governing future development. The inherent interdisciplinarity of this approach brings students into frequent contact with professors, practitioners and experts in urban planning, architecture and landscape architecture, and encourages students to forge their own tailored degree by pursuing an independent study and a variety of electives in the College. Students relate their independent study projects to one of the College’s fields of expertise, such as participatory design in distressed communities, post-industrial landscapes, “green streets”, vernacular design or historic preservation.
Context
Denver and the American West provide an exciting urban laboratory as we face a number of complex and difficult challenges (e.g. water scarcity, urban sprawl). Students undertake at least one studio in the Denver metropolitan region while remaining cognizant that similar systems and challenges exist in a variety of domestic and international contexts. As a capstone project during their final term, students enroll in an international studio course, preparing for this studio by taking a mandatory seminar in global design history and practice.
Practice
The MUD program is informed by innovations in practice. Tested techniques and methods are brought into classroom and studio settings to be evaluated, refined and disseminated in ways that prepare graduates for highly innovative work as critical, reflective urban designers employed in both the public and private sectors. In addition, each spring semester brings a visiting urban design fellow to the College. This Practitioner-in-Residence is selected from a highly competitive pool of designers from around the world. The selected practitioner teaches an advanced urban design studio and supervises independent study projects.
Strategic Vision
The MUD program exemplifies the two key principles of the College's strategic vision for Integrative Design.
1. The College will engage design and planning challenges that are significant for our society.
In recent years, MUD courses have examined new alternatives to suburban sprawl, innovations in transit-oriented development (TOD), new approaches to land use regulations including form-based codes and a relationship to physical plans, and alternatives to typical urban drainage solutions that enhance and create value in the urban environment.
2. The College will engage these challenges in partnerships among the disciplines and with our external communities. Historically, the MUD program has been very open to other disciplines. Significant linkages to academics and professionals active in both public and private sector practice provide rich opportunities for broad external community engagement in the College's four focus areas (Emerging Design Practices, Sustainable Urbanism, Healthy Environments, Cultural Heritage) and opportunities to enhance the relevance of the MUD. The MUD program also collaborates with the College's Research Centers and the Colorado Center of Community Development (CCCD) in ways that reinforce the College's support of the broader Denver campus vision.
Accurate as of 6/16/09