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  • Urban Design strategies for the developing world: excerpt from work done by the McGill Minimum Cost Housing Group.

  • Urban Design practitioners continuously develop their understanding of how people use space, as here in New York City, to intervene more effectively on public space and the built environment.

  • Cluster housing study (Prof. N. Luka)

  • Urban design often aims to create human-scaled urban form with plenty of vegetation, as in this typical early-20th-century Montreal neighbourhood; this helps ensure that people can live contentedly at higher densities.

  • Urban design focuses on making public spaces where all sorts of people will feel compelled to gather, as here in North Vancouver.

  • Creating people-friendly public space (such as this Montreal street) is a major preoccupation in urban design.

Urban Design and Housing

Applications are now invited to study Urban Design and Housing for the academic session beginning in September 2012. Students can specialise in this growing field of practice through a post-professional Master of Architecture (M.Arch.) degree offered in the School of Architecture, which is housed in McGill's stately Macdonald-Harrington Building, built in the mid-1890s.

The Macdonald-Harrington Building, home of the McGill Urban Design and Housing o

The program of study for the Urban Design and Housing option is conducted in the heart of Montréal, a city-region centred on a 500km2 island in the St. Lawrence River. This metropolis of almost four million is one of North America's most cosmopolitan, with a vibrant public realm and a richly diverse built environment, ranging from the 17th-century urban form of Vieux-Montréal to sprawling contemporary 'edge cities' on the north and south shores of the Saint Lawrence River. Montréal is also a cultural crossroads for dozens of cultures which greatly enrich its bilingual French/English heritage.

We use the city and region of Montréal as our workshop, benefiting from collaboration with the municipal administration and its professional staff. Knowledge of French is useful in this bilingual context, but it is not a requirement of the McGill programs; all courses and studio projects are conducted in English, although students can submit their work in either English or French.

McGill's Urban Design and Housing specialist option helps prepare accredited professionals of the built environment--such as architects, landscape architects, planners, and civil engineers--to work in this burgeoning area of practice and research.

Find out more about Urban Design and Housing at McGill by exploring this website!

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Updated on Mon, 2012-03-26 11:28
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