Georgetown will begin offering a full-year, six-credit course in fall 2017 named the Urban Studio Program. The program is supported by the Designing the Future(s) of the University Initiative, and was created with assistance from the Red House, a part of the Designing the Future(s) Initiative that allows students and faculty to work together on developing new curricula.
The studio is a year-long project that allows students to design collaborative projects with an off-campus focus, according to its website. The website identifies “The Urban Five,” five professors who worked together on creating the project: Randall Amster, a justice and peace studies professor, Sherry Linkon, a professor in the English department, Laurie King, a professor in the anthropology department, Shiloh Krupar, a culture and politics professor, and Brian McCabe, a professor in the sociology department.
“Students participated in some early conversations, sharing their hopes for the project,” Linkon wrote in an email to the Voice. “A Red House Fellow, Erika Bullock, designed our website and has helped us with other aspects of promoting the project.” (Full disclosure: Bullock is a former Voice staffer.) The program requires an application due April 1 for fall 2017.
“The idea is that we want students to come up with big projects, things that don’t fit into the parameters of a fifteen week semester,” McCabe said. The studio is intended to give students the ability to stay with a single project for an entire year instead of fitting it into one semester. McCabe said that the course is more self-directed instead of syllabus-based, with the onus on the students to determine the directions of their projects.
Georgetown lacks a formal urban studies program. The Center for Social Justice and other similar organizations offer opportunities to students to work in the D.C. area in various social justice programs. “There wasn’t a chance to link up the work the students were doing with the academic study of this,” McCabe said.
The Urban Studio was the result of two years of conversations between the five professors, according to Linkon. It aims to expand academics beyond the classroom and to improve students’ understanding of the historical contexts at work in the communities they help.
McCabe said that he hopes that the program will introduce students to working on collaborative projects in urban planning. “Urban planning is an incredibly collaborative field,” he said. “You have to know a little bit about the economics of the city, you have to know a little bit about the politics of the city, you have to know a little bit about architecture and design.”
McCabe expressed hope that by connecting experiences in the city with a course intended to acclimate students to collaborative work, the program will expand Georgetown’s traditional class structure. “We hope that this model will be much better for helping students enter that sort of career.”
