This studio seeks to challenge both the inherent and historic inequalities and exclusions that Urban Design entails as a discipline by asking the most critical and broadest of questions, yet demanding that physical plans—novel and radical typologies of equity— be produced as the result of the process. Focusing on the question of agency, and while acknowledging the growing role of communal participation, this studio asks students to develop new equitable typologies for a site within metro Boston that disrupts the decision-making inequities that persist in making the same old built forms and typologies. Can a new set of urban design agendas and professional skills emerge from pushing for more equitable urban forms? This was the focus of the fall 2020 joint urban design studio, supported by the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism.
