BA in Urban Studies and the Built Environment, City College of New York

The BA in Urban Studies and the Built Environment at the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York provides students with the opportunity to study urban life and environments from a rich multidisciplinary perspective. The program sits squarely at the intersection of art history, design history, sociology and other social science disciplines, and architecture. Cassim Shepard, the Distinguished Lecturer at Spitzer who helped design the program, says that it is intended to provide a humanistic and social science alternative to a traditional architecture degree for students interested in the urban, built environment.

From the beginning, Shepard and his colleagues had several student constituencies in mind for the degree. A number of undergraduates studying architecture at Spitzer were drawn to historical inquiry. The architecture program itself, already a five-year professional program with very specific accreditation requirements, could not meet those interests; the only alternative for those students was the CUNY BA program, a fully independent and self-directed program. Given CUNY’s strength in urban studies scholarship, a PhD program was contemplated, but the needs of current and future undergraduates proved to be of more immediate concern. A larger group of students would often decide, in the second or third year of their architecture BA, that it wasn’t for them, often for personal and financial reasons. Those students were dropping out of Spitzer and changing to other degree programs within CUNY. There was incentive for Spitzer to find a way to meet the needs and interests of those students, as well as their peers who were interested in history inquiry and its implications for policy-making. 

There were several pre-existing urban studies degrees in the CUNY system, including at both Hunter and Queens Colleges. Shepard and his colleagues wanted their program to be distinct enough not to compete with either of them, and to capitalize on the fact that Spitzer is currently the only public school of architecture in New York City. The strong connection to architecture means that graduates of the program are well-suited for jobs in city agencies and non-design jobs in architecture and city-planning firms; other students may go on to graduate work in architecture or urban planning. 

The goal is for graduates of the program to be broad-based and interdisciplinary in their understanding of the urban environment, rather than highly specialized; this means, for example, that the curriculum includes fewer required math courses than the BA in architecture but does require students to take quantitative research courses. Students in Urban Studies and the Built Environment have access to the entire architecture curriculum except for studio classes. In addition, there is a 4 course core that includes:

• Introduction to Urban Studies 
• The City in History 
• Techniques of Urban Communication (a new skills-based course on how to tell qualitative stories about cities and neighborhoods through digital cartography and documentary filmmaking methods)
• Social Justice and the Built Environment (designed to feed into the capstone project)

The experience culminates in two semesters of a capstone project. Currently the capstone project is done through independent study, but once the program is large enough to support it, the first semester may become a research methods course and the second will be independent. Students’ capstone projects run the gamut from the practical to the theoretical. Some students want to work for the Metropolitan Transit Authority, while others want to study the historic formation of subway planning; both outcomes are possible in the context of this program.

In addition to the required core and capstone projects, there is a predetermined list of electives outside of Spitzer that students are encouraged to take. This is something that students in the architecture program don’t have the credit space for, so the BA in Urban Studies and the Built Environment has become something of a bridge program, connecting Spitzer to other CUNY programs and colleges. Shepard notes that the interdisciplinary nature of the program will expose architecture students to other ways of thinking about the built environment. 

Spitzer has a strong commitment to social justice, but that commitment has been unevenly applied within the traditional architecture curriculum; however, it’s woven into every aspect of the Urban Studies and the Built Environment program. With fewer required credit hours than the architecture BA, students may have more time for extracurricular activities and electives, thereby bringing a more traditional undergraduate experience into a professional school. At the same time, Shepard hopes to leverage the strong culture of critique, portfolio reviews, oral feedback, and invited guests in architecture to distinguish this program from its counterparts at other CUNY colleges.

There remain bureaucratic and infrastructural barriers to interdisciplinarity. It is difficult, for example, for Spitzer to hire a doctoral student in art history for their faculty; crosslisting courses is sometimes possible but it is hard to trade and buy faculty teaching hours within the CUNY system. However, urban studies is a popular and growing field precisely because it allows for expertise as a generalist, pulling on disciplines from environmental studies to economics, from sociology and history to housing policy and political science. As the program grows, Shepard and his colleagues are continuing to explore opportunities for service-based learning and internships, to help their students gain the experience necessary to pursue the interests and work that led them to Spitzer.