MUD 1

GRADUATE STUDIO
UD 712 STUDIO I
FALL 2023

Suburbs, as the primary model of American territoriality, shape in great part this county’s spatial configuration and structures of power and social relation. Metro Detroit, too, is characterized by decades of suburbanization. The region’s environmental and racial power relations were cast through processes of suburbanization, which remain largely in place. This studio explores the spatial dimensions of justice as they pertain to urbanization and the spatial politics of suburbs. How have suburbs contributed to spatial injustice and how does this play out today? How to approach suburbs with a lens to systemic power relations? What can urban designers learn from, and contribute to, social movements and struggles for spatial justice already underway in suburbs?

This design-research studio focuses on suburbs and the suburban frontier as a site to advance spatial justice through design. More specifically, the studio engages with the suburbs of Metro Detroit and propose pathways to mitigate their footprint through new spatial patterns, socio-legal practices, financial arrangements, and ecocultural relations. Urban design will be our means to operate on the infrastructural conditions and underlying dynamics of the territory, which are in fact already designed, although rarely by designers. Developing frameworks to transition from the frontier mentality of urbanization, students will engage on the politics of space and rehearse contemporary urban design methods attuned to the systemic contingencies, risks, and inequities of such frontier zones: how to intervene rather than plan, orchestrate rather than compose, metabolize rather than build?