The urban design program emphasizes sustainable interventions or strategies at neighborhood, city and emerging city or regional scales. Lectures, studios and seminars provide a broad range of tools for placemaking and consensus seeking, and address alternative landscape and transportation infrastructure, climatic responsiveness, urban preservation, historic typologies, economic strategies, and financing incentives with emerging technologies.
Global urban designers must also take into account cultural and climatic indices of urban form. At SCAD, students and faculty collaborate to address international issues in cities on all continents.