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Colorful miniature city model with high-rise buildings, roads, vehicles, and railway tracks showcasing urban infrastructure and planning.

Online Master of Design Studies in Urban Design

Online Master of Design Studies in Urban Design

The new Online Master of Design Studies in Urban Design curriculum is designed to help professionals think and operate at the scale where cities are shaped. Students move beyond isolated projects to understand how urban form, policy, economics, and communities interact—and how design can influence those systems.

Through a sequence of studios, seminars, and applied coursework, students develop the ability to analyze urban conditions, frame complex problems, and propose implementable strategies for sustainability, equity, housing, and climate resilience. The curriculum balances conceptual rigor with practical tools, preparing graduates to lead urban design work in real-world professional contexts.

Curriculum Courses*

The curriculum progresses from foundational design principles to advanced studios and a capstone project focused on real urban challenges. Students build critical thinking and technical skills through site analysis, stakeholder engagement, and strategic planning, producing actionable proposals for transit-oriented development, housing equity, and community regeneration.

Integrating design with economics, law, and environmental strategy, the program emphasizes interdisciplinary collaboration and applied learning. Graduates complete the curriculum prepared to lead urban design initiatives that balance heritage, innovation, resilience, and social equity.

*The MDS-UD curriculum is still being finalized and is subject to change.

Urban design in action of a modern business district outdoor plaza with geometric paving, shaded walkways, trees, and glass skyscrapers under clear sky.
Connecting practice and theory, this course introduces the complexities of designing public space. Lectures and readings will introduce students to the concerns and scope of urban design, from the morphology of cities to community engagement practices. Through precedents and case studies, students will gain an understanding of the processes and techniques employed by urban designers. Urban design concepts will be explored by investigating conditions on selected sites, discussing issues and opportunities, and proposing design ideas for improvement.
Introduction to Urban Design
Architect working on building plans with blueprints, calculator, notebook, and residential scale model, illustrating urban economics concepts.
This asynchronous graduate seminar connects urban economics, strategy, and city competition to design practice. Students learn how cities compete for capital, residents, visitors, and talent, and how those contests influence regional economics, transportation, districts, streets, public spaces, and development choices. Through case studies, short memos, and a term project, the seminar breaks down economic forces, real estate logic, transportation strategy, branding theory, heritage value, urban decay, and regenerative strategies. The class stays focused on equity and power, probing who benefits, who pays the price, and where design can anchor fairer, longer-lasting, urban strategies. The term closes with a district-scale urban strategy and brand dossier linking analysis, narrative, design moves, implementation tools, and risk assessment.
Urban Economics, Strategy, and the Competitive City
Urban street with zebra crossing, modern glass buildings, elevated transit structure, traffic lights, and pedestrians under a bright blue sky.
Urban sites are inherently complex. This online seminar trains students to read a site through data, demography, history, and lived experience. Students then turn that understanding into a persuasive narrative about the designed future with the understanding that place is not a static construct, instead evolving accounts deepen as research continues and places transform. Students are introduced to municipal GIS mapping tools, and work in a single study area across the term. Students build skills in basic data analysis, archival and documentary research, remote observation, and online public participation. The course emphasizes visual storytelling and argument, so that by the end of the semester students can support a position on change and preservation with maps, diagrams, and voices from the community. All work is completed asynchronously except for a real-time online public visioning workshop run by the students.
Site, Story, Stakeholders
Historic and modern cityscape blending classical architecture with contemporary structures, illustrating urban theory and experience since Enlightenment.
This course is centered on the question of how people experience, think about, and contest urban form. Study begins with the Enlightenment, when science and reason treated physical form as something that could be studied, tested, and re-engineered, leading to the alteration of streets, public space, and the idea of what a city could become. Students move between close reading of plans and streets, key texts in urban theory and philosophy, and accounts of daily life in different city fabrics. Weekly modules pair cases with ideas from environmental psychology, phenomenology, and philosophy of the city. Students practice short written arguments and small interpretive diagrams. By the end, they can narrate major shifts in urban form, link them to ways of seeing and inhabiting the city, and analyze how power, ideology, and memory are built into streets, blocks, and districts.
City Since the Enlightenment, Theory, and Experience
Close-up of hand using stylus on digital tablet to create architectural floor plan for modern building design in advanced urban representation.
This online design media course treats urban representation as a rigorous design method and a practical professional skill. Students work across a full digital workflow, from annotated base maps and multi-layer GIS views through 2D CAD, SketchUp massing, and Adobe layouts, with AI image tools used to test scenarios and narratives. Exercises focus on turning data and design ideas into clear, legible graphics that a client, community, or review body can use to make decisions. Short critiques train students to read drawings as claims about equity, space, power, and value, then rework them into diagrams, views, reports, and slide decks that can stand up in professional reviews and public settings.
Advanced Urban Representation
Boston skyline at sunset with historic Faneuil Hall in foreground and modern skyscrapers in background, symbolizing law and built environment.
This asynchronous seminar treats the built environment as a regulatory landscape created, protected, and contested through law. Buildings, districts, and infrastructure sit inside overlapping systems of federal, state, and local authorities that define what can be altered; what must be preserved, and who gets a voice. Students survey the main legal and policy tools that shape the city, including preservation ordinances, zoning, aesthetic regulation and review, building and housing codes, environmental review, and commission powers. Topics such as housing justice, gentrification, sustainability, and community advocacy appear through court cases and current debates. By the end of the term, students can read a street, block, or project as a legal construct, and understand how urban design, preservation, and planning practice operates inside the legal framework.
Law and the Built Environment
Detailed miniature cityscape surrounded by greenery showcasing sustainable urban planning principles for future cities in design studio.
Building on the introductory course, this studio explores block- and neighborhood-scale design. Students analyze built form, landscape, transit, and policy, then develop proposals linking transit-oriented development, adaptive reuse, and sustainability with equity and placemaking. Work progresses from site documentation and mapping to massing, street and block design, and phased implementation. The term culminates in a coherent urban design plan and strategic brief for change.
Urban Design Studio
Aerial view of an urban park under development with circular plazas, green spaces, and surrounding cityscape for capstone research in design.
This online research workshop prepares students for their Capstone Studio to address the “wicked problems” of urbanism, by focusing on how to frame a real project. Working at a district scale, students practice analysis, public participation, and neighborhood visioning to move from loose questions to a clear, scoped project brief and work plan. Methods include observation and data gathering, stakeholder interviews, and simple survey tools, along with facilitation techniques for online and in person engagement. Attention stays on problem finding, not just problem solving; students learn to surface competing narratives, review basic zoning and policy conditions, name constraints and opportunities, and test early ideas with community and professional audiences. The term ends with a research dossier and capstone brief that define the site, issues, goals, success measures, and practical next steps for the following studio.
Urban Design Capstone Research
Person designing colorful miniature buildings within scaled urban neighborhood layout featuring trees and streetscape elements for capstone studio.
This online studio builds on prior research to tackle a complex urban challenge. Students define design and planning priorities to regenerate a district-scale site, linking urban form to mobility, housing, equity, preservation, and landscape systems. Proposals must address real-world regulations and market conditions while presenting ambitious yet feasible strategies for long-term community health and resilience. The term concludes with a public-facing package—drawings, models, diagrams, metrics, and a clear brief—articulating a compelling regenerative vision.
Urban Design Capstone Studio
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