This studio takes landscape systems at the city scale as a framework for design. Landscape systems span and shape cities and urban regions, as well as political boundaries. Landscape systems include geology, hydrology, vegetation, habitat, transportation, open space, infrastructure and built form. All of these systems exert environmental impacts which affect quality of life at many scales-- the metropolitan, the city, the precinct, the neighbourhood as well as local streets and spaces.

In this studio, students consider how metropolitan landscape systems have informed and shaped urban settlement, and vice versa. In a suite of directed design projects, students are given a future scenario which guides and challenges their design thinking in terms of scale and complexity. During the course students will develop knowledge of the relationship between landscape systems and urban settlements and extend their abilities to plan and design landscapes as integrated components of city and metropolitan systems.