Travel Study Opportunities

Work on public space design assignments in Mexico City and engage with renowned local design and planning professionals

Take excursions around Mexico City and nearby locales in the region

Enjoy a mix of in-studio presentations, site visits, walking tours, and field data collection activities

Stay in student lodging located in compelling and diverse core urban neighborhoods

Work in small interdisciplinary groups and engage with students from other programs within the College of Architecture and Planning

6 Credits

Choose from one of the following courses: URPL 6000 (Planning Project Studio) or URBN 6700 (Urban Design Advanced Travel Studio)

$5,040

Included: tuition and fees, shared accommodations, excursions, some meals, in-country transportation, & international health and evacuation insurance

Not included: international airfare, most meals, personal expenses, visa fees (if applicable)

Private group visits to internationally recognized architectural sites: Hvitträsk, the home and studio of Eero Saarinen; and Alvar Aalto’s home and studio in Helsinki.

Guest lectures by Finnish scholars on the history of Helsinki’s urban design, the history of Finnish views of nature, and Finland's sustainability initiative.

Private tours and guest lectures on the history of Finnish furniture design (Artek, etc.).

Meetings with designers and tours of their offices (landscape, architecture, planning).

Excursion to Tampere, Finland with guided tour / visit to local design firm. Full day of sketching and study at Suomenlinna, UNESCO World Heritage site in Helsinki Harbor.

Minimum 3.0 (undergraduate), 3.5 (graduate)

6 Credits

ARCH 6520 and LDAR 6520 (graduate),
ARCH 3690 and 3691 (undergraduate)

Weekly excursions include visits to Tivoli, Hadrian’s Villa, Ostia Antica, and Orvieto.

Visit historical sites, project sites, and museums, all interspersed with sketching.

Selected sites’ architecture and urbanism will be studied using multiple sketches with the objective to represent the site through a single architectural drawing.

Your work will culminate at the end of the trip with a presentation in Rome to be followed up with an exhibition in the fall semester.

B.S.Arch
Upper-division standing
Minimum 2.5 GPA

M.Arch
Completed Studio II or equivalent
Minimum 3.0  GPA

B.S.Arch
ARCH 3693 - Rome: Architecture and Urbanism
ARCH 3694 - Rome: Documentation, Analysis and Design

M.Arch
ARCH 6755 - Rome: Architecture and Urbanism
ARCH 6760 - Rome: Documentation, Analysis and Design

$5780

Includes:

• Instruction
• Housing
• Entrance Fees
• Excursions
• Local and Regional travel in Rome
• Travel Insurance
• Welcome and Farwell Dinners
  

Does Not Include:

• Airfare
• Daily Food
• Supplies
• Entertainment
• Travel on weekends and/or before or after the program
• Visa fees
  

See first-hand many of the innovative and interesting solutions to energy and water management challenges and explore the underlying policies and policy implementation techniques in Denmark’s regions and communities.

Visit sites across Denmark and immerse yourself into the Nordic culture and democratic design.

Experience exciting outcomes of green infrastructure and renewable energy integrated into the urban fabric.

Urban design and urban planning students will head to Barcelona, Spain in the summer of 2022 for an interdisciplinary studio focused on learning the principles, tools, and methodologies for planning, analyzing, and designing great urban public spaces.

The first phase of the studio focuses on public space fundamentals by exploring the history and evolution of Barcelona’s urban fabric and its numerous parks and plazas and the urban issues facing the city today; understanding the principles of public space planning and design; and learning how to design and execute public space assessments in a variety of urban contexts.

The second phase focuses on creating a public space concept plan and design for a specific site in the city’s dynamic Poblenou neighborhood, including site assessments and analyses, a public engagement pop-up event, engaging with local design and planning practitioners, and an iterative process to produce a public space and urban design concept plan for a locally based client.

Master of Urban and Regional Planning program

Instructor: Korkut Onaran

In the summer of 2019, Planning Project Studio students traveled to Dillon, Colorado to focus on reimagining Dillon's downtown core and working towards diversity and self-sufficiency in the community. As part of the initial work, students revisited Summit County’s planning agenda and reviewed the potential role of Dillon in the area’s economy in relation with surrounding towns, including Frisco, Breckenridge, and Silverthorne. Some of the key challenges identified by the students were Dillon’s seasonality and dependence on summer tourism, its shortage of workforce housing, the fact that it is relatively unknown even to Colorado residents, and the town’s lack of a distinct public realm. As part of the studio, students provided a vision for the future of Dillon and laid out key goals for the city to pursue, including diversifying the local economy, creating a more self-sufficient economy, increasing workforce housing, and working towards more equitable income distribution. The class also identified target areas and industries for the town to focus on such as tech and small businesses, arts/culture/music, the outdoor industry, and culinary enterprises.

Master of Urban and Regional Planning program

Instructor: Ryan Sotirakis

In the summer of 2019, Planning Project Studio students undertook a multi-faceted project in Leadville, Colorado the highest town in North America. After an initial “first impressions” site visit, students researched the community’s recent planning efforts, demographics, land uses, and development history. Early meetings with Leadville’s town and county planners, economic development officials, elected officials, and affordable housing groups helped define the scope of the studio project. Some of the key challenges identified by the students and the client were Leadville’s serious affordable housing shortage, lack of safe and convenient bicycle and pedestrian routes through town, and a general lack of policy consistency and funding availability for housing and infrastructure projects. Building on previous efforts by several MURP Capstone projects, students provided a vision for the future of Leadville and laid out key goals for the city to pursue, including the design of a new mixed-income residential community, town-wide redevelopment and infill design guidelines, policy recommendations for economic development, housing creation and transportation goals, and creation of a cohesive network of non-automobile mobility throughout town and connecting to the larger regional trail system.

Master of Urban Design program

Master of Urban and Regional Planning program

Instructors: Jeremy Németh, Ken Schroeppel

Urban design and urban planning students engaged in an intensive 25-day program studying "Streets as Public Spaces" in Barcelona, Spain during Summer 2018. Streets traditionally had three main functions: as routes for mobility, as public gathering spaces, and as building frontages, but these functions have become separated throughout the course of the 20th century in many cities worldwide. However, due to various political, cultural, and economic reasons, Barcelona has managed to preserve the harmony among the three functions in many of their streets, resulting in an urban fabric that is the envy of the world. In the first phase of the studio, students learned the principles of public space design and then used this knowledge to conduct public space assessments of various site in Barcelona. The second phase of the Barcelona studio gave students the opportunity to use the public space analysis and design concepts and methodologies gained in the first phase on a real site in Barcelona—the historic Can Ricart site in the Poblenou neighborhood. Working in interdisciplinary teams, the students prepared three urban design visions that reimagined the public realm in the Can Ricart site and surrounding blocks.

Master of Urban Design program

Master of Urban and Regional Planning program

Instructors: Jeremy Németh, Ken Schroeppel

Urban design and urban planning students engaged in an intensive 24-day program in Barcelona, Spain during Summer 2019 that focused on the revitalization of underperforming public spaces. As cities worldwide continue to urbanize, having great public spaces available to all citizens is critical. However, some public spaces aren’t successful for various reasons, so urban designers and planners must facilitate the revitalization of these important community places. In the studio’s first phase, students learned the principles of public space design and used that knowledge to develop and conduct public space assessment methodologies at various sites in Barcelona. The second phase consisted of the preparation of a Revitalization Plan for Park del Centre del Poblenou, an underutilized park that is physically and psychologically isolated from its dynamic surrounding neighborhood, a historically industrial area that is transforming into a more dense and diverse urban area. The students’ recommendations for revitalizing the park were given to a local neighborhood advocacy organization, the studio client, to help them as they work with the city to redesign and revitalize one of their most prominent neighborhood parks.

This Immersive Semester represented a rare and exciting opportunity for in-depth explorations of urban space and design in one of the most hurricane-ravaged areas of the United States. In this immersive semester, we investigated and observed San Juan, Ponce, and other coastal communities up close to explore human settlement and investigate how different approaches and responses to climatic and geographic conditions, public space, the layout and organization of the communities, and the island’s infrastructural systems contribute to livability. Puerto Rico has a varied and rich history and is a place with many significant challenges. These challenges include food insecurity, mounting debt, and a declining population. Hurricane Maria highlighted almost all of the issues and has opened the door for meaningful change to occur and help Puerto Rico move into a prosperous, sustainable and equitable future. As future landscape architects, we are tasked to change the places people live in, co-evolved with and are an inseparable part of. Understanding those places in-depth, their stories and histories, and their physical and cultural contexts is a central and critical requirement if we want to make meaningful change – in practical as well as in ethical terms.

The studio focused on sustainable tourism planning, the study and practice of reducing environmental and social impacts of tourism, while achieving benefits for both the place and tourists. Sustainable tourism planning involves research on impacts from touristic activities; development of business practices to minimize and mitigate negative impacts; creation of financial sources to support environmental management and preservation; inclusion of all stakeholders; and a long-term vision for sustaining people and place. The course began with a traveling orientation and comparison of three tourist locations; Athens, Naxos, and Santorini, during which students employed systematic observations of street life, creative writing, and sketching to digest what they experienced. The studio then located to the study area, the beach town of Nea Kydonia near Chania, Crete. For two weeks, students analyzed quantitative data from local and national governments, collected additional mixed-methods data through interviews, primary data collection on housing, businesses, and transportation infrastructure, and participant observation, and met daily to report and brainstorm on the economic, social, and environmental future of the area in order to develop their recommendations. The studio presented their preliminary findings and recommendations to the municipality and community and used the discussion and feedback to guide the final report.