Welcome to the Department of Urban Planning and Design
It was at Harvard University that the first formal North American programs in city and regional planning (1923) and urban design (1960) were established. Since then, Harvard has played a leading role in the education of urban planners and urban designers.
The Department of Urban Planning and Design is home to both professions, offering a first professional degree in urban planning and a post-professional degree in urban design. Composed of internationally experienced scholars and practitioners, the department’s faculty explores the built environment from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and points of view. The department’s pedagogically innovative combination of interdisciplinary studios, lecture courses, seminars, and independent study, coupled with a relatively small student size of roughly 100 individuals drawn from around the world, create an intimate, engaged educational atmosphere in which students thrive and learn.
Accredited by the Planning Accreditation Board and open to students with an undergraduate degree, the two-year professional Master in Urban Planning degree program focuses on planning for the development, preservation, and enhancement of the built environment. Students learn how to understand, analyze, and influence the variety of forces—social, economic, cultural, legal, political, ecological, and aesthetic, among others—shaping the built environment. The post-professional, two-year Master of Architecture in Urban Design and Master of Landscape Architecture in Urban Design degree programs enable architects and landscape architects to address the larger scale of urban problems through formal techniques and application of knowledge from complementary areas of expertise such as real estate, law, and the history of urbanism.
Students take full advantage of the curricular and extracurricular offerings of the Design School’s other departments of landscape architecture and architecture. The Department also draws upon the significant resources of Harvard University as a whole. Two professorships are shared with the Kennedy School of Government and the Urban Planning program administers a joint degree program with the Law School. Students often cross-register in courses offered by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Kennedy School, the Business School, the Law School, and the School of Public Health. Students also cross-register in courses offered by the neighboring Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Rodolfo Machado, Department Co-Chair
Jerold S. Kayden, Department Co-Chair