Master in Design for Urban Environment

Strategic design for actual and future needs in the urban context.
The city is one of humanity's most important inventions and it is facing basic challenges for the
future in the 21st century.
Against this backdrop, design is an essential tool for improving the social, cultural and economic fabric of the urban contexts in which we live.
Through a knowledge and understanding of past and present urban environments and by projecting for the future, we can design new proposals that adapt to the changes that the future holds with those people living in and managing them.
The main areas of work covered are:

• Sustainability: design for sustainable development
• Social Inclusion: empowering citizens to confront social challenges
• Governance: cooperation, e-democracy, open data, transparency
• Mobility design to solve the challenges of urban mobility
• Safe cities design to contribute to the safety of people

• Conduct research into places and people, analysing and understanding the physical, social, political and economic context of spaces and users.
• Manage and visualise data to provide accurate diagnoses about situations and make well-informed decisions.
• Help citizens to participate actively in transforming their urban environments, developing critical judgments and transferring their opinions to technicians and elected officials, empowering them to take a shared responsibility in decision-making.
• Promote and preserve the city´s own identity.
• Optimise the city´s efficiency: accessibility, exchange, plurality and coexistence for balanced, harmonious growth or renovation and to improve the living conditions of all citizens.
• Create distinct urban identities, contributing to preserve heritage and building future city models committed to the democratic values of a respect for interculturality and sustainable, solidarity.

• Tools for the critical analysis of urban environments, understanding which macro-fundamental contexts operate in urban environments, such as geographical, political, historical, cultural, social and economic. Helping to identify and analyse the morphology and physical components of historical and current cities in order to project futures around specific elements of environment and landscape, mobility/accessibility, spaces, urban elements and materials...
• Understanding the factors related to specific people and human communities in relation to the uses of the city: coexistence, mediation, associations, safety and health, as well as elements related to services such as energy, sustainability, recycling, telecommunications or management.
• Tools to be able to make strategic diagnoses on the deficits and opportunities of urban environments by learning methodologies that can detect these and exercises that can develop the ability to identify and express potential design solutions applicable to addressing deficits by taking advantage of opportunities.
• Tools for planning proposals related to design by anticipating factors of non-viability and being aware of the vectors of complexity related to the singularity of the context, multiplicity and heterogeneity of the actors involved and the times and uncertainties inherent in urban environment projects.
• Tools to conduct work as a positive element in the complex mechanisms of new urban environment governance, understanding the role and functions that correspond to designers at each stage of the projects in which they are involved, both as a part of teams and in relation to the other actors involved, with the ability to be able to mediate and design suitable material for each stage and team.
• Tools to propose and implement specific design solutions adapted to prior requirements and planning in order to create fair, adequate, new/updated, different and better urban environments.

• Travel design experience.
• Design tour.
• ED Master professional talks and experiences.
• Public speaking.
• Portfolio and personal branding.

• Italian design culture and history.
• Design process.
• Social design and sustainability.