For more than a decade, the third semester MArch / MLA and first semester postgraduate MUD core urbanism studio have been the cornerstone of interdisciplinary graduate design pedagogy at the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. Last year the studio was entirely reconceived in response to the reckoning call of social justice, the COVID-19 global pandemic, and the urgency of the climate crisis. This reformulation necessitated a new syllabus and an overhaul of pedagogical goals and teaching methods shared by three co-coordinators, Fadi Masoud (MLA),Michael Piper (MUD), and Mason White (MArch). The studio cohort includes 13instructors, 13 teaching sections, and 100+ graduate design students. Re-dubbed as the Integrated Urbanism Studio, the studio negotiates design’s agency in dealing with climate resilience and adaptation, social and environmental justice, housing, decarbonization, employment, energy, food, waste, and other urban infrastructure by providing a platform for students to engage in common areas of research and design exploration. At this moment, two interrelated conditions press the viability of cities. The first is the environmental cost of modern urbanization as epitomized by the climate crisis.The other is the social liabilities of development led by private interests.Together, these conditions have produced tremendous inequities in health, housing, services, mobility, and employment. Until now, modern cities have internalized these costs as accepted consequences of urban growth. Today, we know that to maximize the effectiveness of climate adaptation on urban form, multiple policy instruments must work in tandem to achieve resilience and legitimacy. In the absence of innovative urban design strategies, costly infrastructural engineering solutions and normative development practices will continue to proliferate and fail. This studio negotiates these seemingly conflicting endeavours into design projects for Toronto’s urban region. We recognize that it would be difficult to synthesize all of our knowledge into a single project in a 12-week semester; instead, each discipline approaches shared subjects of investigation from a lens appropriate to their field of study. As such, the studio provides a platform for students to work from distinct disciplinary approaches that are ultimately shared through a body of integrated design knowledge. MArch and MUD students are required to develop urban design schemes for housing int he context of climate, social equity, and mobility issues. MLA students are required to envision urban projects at the intersection of ecology, infrastructure, and climate resilience (especially urban heat and flooding) in the public realm. All projects need to foreground the threats of climate-induced green gentrification and engage with equity, access, and power issues. The studio is structured in three phases: 1) Policy mapping and identification of Design Action Zones(DAZs), 2) Precedent as a critique and as typology, and 3) multi-scalar urban design transformation.
This studio participated in the 2020-2021 LAF's Green New Deal SuperStudio
The projects ranged from pragmatic to speculative and covered a wide variety of issues, innovation, scales, and geographic regions. A curated set of 55 projects were selected to illustrate the breadth of work submitted and are organized into six categories: Adapt, Empower, Energize, Remediate, Retrofit and Cultivate. Out of 670 submissions, two Daniels Faculty Masters of Landscape Architecture projects from last year’s Integrated Urbanism Studio were selected and featured here: Re:charge by Joey Chiu, Agata Mrozowski, Tina Cui, and Nadia Chan; and Welcome To Black Creek: Re-Imagining Water as Life by Alex Sheinbaum, Agata Molendowski, Evelyn Babalis, and Natasha Raseta.
2020 Instructors
MUD, Michael Piper (coordinator) / Sneha Mandan
MLA, Fadi Masoud (coordinator) / Meghan Esopenko
MARCH, Mason White (coordinator) / Roberto Damiani / Lisa Rappaport / Aziza Chaouni / Christos Marcopoulos / Dina Sarhane / Monica Hutton / Jon Cummings
