What are we up to? Is it time for us to reformulate our take on the disparate traditions of Urban Planning, Urban Design, Urbanism, Urban Architecture and all things sustainable and resilient and smart and uncertain???

We could respond to this trend through expanding partnerships with researchers and educational institutions in these countries, engaging with UN-led initiatives like the New Urban Agenda, and leveraging these activities to re-think the architectural and urban planning canons.

For decades the B.S. in architecture has been assumed to be the first part of a 4+2, in other words the pre-requisite degree for a professional Master of Architecture degree. But do all students pursuing such degrees intend to become licensed professionals? Would it not be better for both the profession and the built environment, if the degree could be understood as disciplinary rather than pre-professional and as such, better integrated with the university at large, and a truly interdisciplinary, liberal education?

In 25 years, I expect to be in the prime of my career…

In many schools of architecture, the diversity of the student body exceeds the diversity of the faculty. A more polyphonic faculty and College will locate architecture in the unanticipated spaces.

Research methods will increasingly become more wet, than dry. Architecture gets hooks into Direct Brain Interface. Genetically modified bodies proliferate in multiscalar and mutlitemporal forms of urbanism unhinged from the city. Systems of reproduction [human-non-human] impact modes of representation. We will need to generate a track for a bioethicist.

The renewed Culture Wars will continue discharging the regimes of fitness and ableism presiding over architectural discourse, and replacing the attributes of performativity and anthropocentrism with a more radical conception of alterity.

Normative concepts of beauty are obliterated by more radical concepts of alterity. How will Taubman College engender practices that respect expanding differences in the social body? How might the rhetoric around diversity, equity and inclusion impact and make vivid the intellectual project of architecture?

Will architectural and educational systems permit a more sophisticated apparatus of tolerance? Will it be permitted to dream beyond the reality; cultivate a wildly imaginative beyond the urban imaginary; so speculative as to be considered scarce – yet able to thrive. We will make space at the table for such projects, or will they be forced out of the market?

The world is increasingly complex. Design methodologies and pedagogies need to up their game, become more dexterous, and savvy. Locating post-disciplinary questions by de-simplifying the mechanics of engagement. Learning outside the institution. The University increasingly feels the pressure to compete with parallel, often more robust and influential forms of education. Don’t let school get in the way of your education. Extreme conditions, demand extreme responses.

Given the plethora of digital artifacts and order-of-one constructions, what types of landscapes and geographies are being cultivated by the post-digital strata? How are current trends in translational research and disruptive technology going to substantially transform the production of architecture as it navigates the viscera of matter and ephemera of media? Ford invented the automobile; and, at a distance global climate change. What is the current project simultaneously inventing for a distant near-now future?

The upward tick of aging populations living longer will challenge intergenerational interdependence. The cultural metrics or mantras, such 30-under-30, are counter-pointed by 700 over 70. An aging population will need affordable, hip, new housing in a post-medicalized environment. 

Gender fluid, trans-queer-crip, inter-speciation > Urbanism.

Uncanny bright green retrofit of North America will drive widespread rediscovery of the built environment, and demand for a different kind of architects. For instead of operational efficiencies, life cycle models, or other familiar soft green paths, this will be about economic and political reconfigurations. Cultural value change takes provocations as much as problem solving, in social fiction and not just science fiction.

At the societal and global scale, climate change is a categorically new, fast-moving and profoundly disruptive challenge, which our college must face head-on and immediately. Social justice is also critical to our agenda, but like the chronic problems of poverty, corruption, racism, disease, war, etc., set-backs and losses can be made up and compensated for, but lost time on addressing climate change cannot be recaptured.