MS/Arch: Urban Design

Atlanta is a metropolitan laboratory for studying Urban Design in the contemporary city. The College of Architecture at Georgia Tech, the geographic and intellectual center of an expanding metropolis of four million, invites graduate students to join the faculty to debate the present and envision the future of Atlanta and contemporary cities across the globe.

The Urban Design Program is an intensive, three-semester post-professional degree program preparing architects, landscape architects, and planners to develop design proposals at urban scales and the strategies to implement them. The Program is interdisciplinary, design focused, and research oriented. Urban Design studios are settings for interdisciplinary and collaborative projects, supported by faculty and courses in the Architecture and City and Regional Planning Programs, and by the Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development.

Graduate students, alumni and faculty have played transformative roles in the recent development of Atlanta and the Southeast. This includes the initial research and proposal leading to the Atlanta Beltline, the urban design policy framework for the development of Atlantic Station, conducting numerous Georgia Conservancy Blueprints Programs across the state, urban design assistance for the Atlanta’s Midtown Alliance and the redevelopment of Midtown, many outreach studio projects across Georgia linking urban design with economic development and brownfield redevelopment, and directing the National Endowment for the Arts’ Mayors Institute for City Design in the Southeast region.

Who should apply

Urban Design is a specialized professional practice within Architecture, Landscape Architecture, City Planning, and Civil Engineering. It is focused on the design of cities and urban regions, including the two- and three-dimensional physical arrangements of land subdivision and land uses, infrastructure, streets, highways, landscapes, and buildings, in both public and private ownerships. Although Urban Design is not a separate academic discipline or field of study, it has a core of knowledge that extends beyond the professional education of its constituent professions. Ultimately, Urban Design aims to design and build places that are eagerly inhabited by diverse people, that are environmentally sustainable, and that enable incremental changes over time to accommodate new people, new uses and new buildings.

The challenges to these four design professions – and to their Urban Design practices – are ever increasing. The global population is now more than 50% urban and the U.S. population more than 80%. Both are growing rapidly, and both are presenting difficult challenges. Although widely varying in degree, both local and global urban design and development problems are similar: guiding infill higher density development in traditional urban centers, retrofitting obsolescent suburban developments of the past fifty years, guiding sustainable development at  sprawling metropolitan fringes, and designing the necessary transportation and mobility infrastructure to guide economic development and support social justice.  There is an increasing need for urban design professionals in private firms, public agencies at all levels of government, and within non-governmental organizations.