The spring semester studio in the Master of Urban Design program at Washington University in St. Louis engages a growing North American city at multiple scales, to examine how urban public and private life can be re/shaped amid intensive pressures of growth and development. This studio uses Washington, D.C., to explore those dynamics of growth, but with an added twist: political life and the additional layers of governance that brings in D.C.

 

Being a nation’s capital brings compounded layers of complexity to the normal local-regional dynamics of city-making, with the federal government competing for the same urban space. Washington D.C. is unique as a major city that is also a district—serving the state—yet not located within any U.S. state. Residents pay federal taxes, but don’t have full elected representation in congress. The familiar slogan Taxation without Representation found on every D.C. license plate suggests the contradiction and frustrations of being local in a capital center. 

 

The studio worked on Poplar Point, a prominent D.C. site within nested planning agendas and with other environmental constraints. Right now, it hangs in the balance having been recently approved by Congress, to transfer ownership from National Park Service to District ownership—based on approval of a masterplan among other things. Poplar Point is poised for development, while overlaid by questions of its relationship to ecologies of the river, and L’Enfant’s original axial geometries. It is difficult to access and yet in proximity to the historic Anacostia neighborhood. The site forms a promontory at the foot of the South Capitol Street Bridge—currently being realigned--across from the reinvented Navy Yard on the Anacostia River.

 

This studio builds upon foundational infrastructural systems thinking and site mapping skills initiated in Washington University in St. Louis’ Elements of Urban Design semester. The goal this semester was to enable students to situate and conceptualize a creative, operational mapping analysis, framework and urban design proposal that meets a range of (coordinated or conflicting) criteria and demands, at a range of scales. These tasks include programming and designing for a new urban district within the framework established such that the designs respond strategically, sustainably, infrastructurally and innovatively to its existing and future context/s.

 

The students navigated a diverse range of formal conditions of the growing American city while negotiating criteria of political and economic pressures, design quality, sustainability, social equity, history, human experience and animal health and habitat needs.