This course explored the power of urban design to structure an equitable, healthy, sustainable and gratifying context for the social lives of its users. The objectives of the course were to design for people and their real needs; to use form and structure to make "places;" to provide a particular site with evocative visions for a complex and dynamic urbanism; and to enhance the economic, social, and ecological sustainability of urban form, and of a selected part of the city in particular, to use credible analytical tools as a basis for projecting alternative future urban design possibilities.

The goal is to instill in students a basic ability to grapple with the astonishingly complex competing demands made on urban space, and to contribute proposals for this contested ground that best resolve these competing demands.