Analysis of Urban Environment

LAUD 372 treats the city as something you have to learn to read before you can design for it, training you to move between macro-, meso-, and micro-scale analysis while drawing on urban sociology and geography to make sense of what you see on the ground. The semester runs like a working studio: you do fieldwork and write it up, tackle two sketch problems under time pressure, and build toward a design brief that turns SWOT findings, photography, and infographics into concrete guidelines. Coming after your earlier studio sequence, it gives you the analytical backbone that later urban design and planning courses assume you already have, the habit of grounding a proposal in evidence rather than intuition.