 So here's how you can find us. We're on, this is our kind of social media and hopefully many of you have checked out our website which is down at the bottom of the screen. I would suggest if you haven't done so to actually go scroll down and hit the publications tab, a little dot there. You can actually get a sense of the student work on that publications tab that gives you a real sense of the kinds of interactions you'll be having with each other and the faculty. So here we are, this is our contact info. You can see our emails below. Also not on the call today, but someone that you'll be having a lot of great interaction with is our professor Emmanuel Admasu, introducing him as well because he will be your fall studio coordinator. And he is an architect, urban designer and artist and is just a fabulous teacher leading the fall studio. So you'll be interacting with the three of us quite a bit in the program. So first wanted to just talk to you about Columbia in the broadest possible sense of the word. This is a image of our campus. This is low library and the famous steps of low library Bianca and Dee and Rhea can all attest that right now it's starting to get a little bit warmer. The second that the weather warms up, this entire plaza is filled with more events and like people hanging out on the South facing steps. And it's really the heart of the Columbia campus at Morningside and our building Avery Hall. You can see right here to the right behind it just tucked behind this very large tree. So this is a sort of a snapshot of your daily life in Manhattan. When you come here. So this is a zoom into our building Avery Hall. This entire building used to be a library and now it consists of a library offices and classrooms. And so actually Avery and then the cluster of buildings in its immediate environments are all connected underground. And so our urban design studio is in the building just immediately behind this. But you'll have many of your classes here in Avery Hall and get to take full use of this world renowned library. Too many students are just looking at Google these days but when you come to Columbia you truly have to take advantage of this incredible resource. Our program office is up on the fourth floor. And so, and we also have a full-time administrator available to help you with any kind of question. So what is the urban design program and what do we study? It's a post professional degree program. So to be admitted you'll have a degree in architecture, landscape architecture or planning. So you have a little bit of a head start on many things. And the goal is to take a full calendar year in three intensive semesters to engage the complex processes of global urbanization with a particular focus on the climate crisis and issues of social justice. And so we also try to ask what is the agency of design and these shifting conditions? And I think the students can attest to we're trying to really push the boundaries of urban designer as advocate, urban designer as a choreographer of larger scale larger scale initiatives and forms of urban change. And so we look at the city not as a kind of a fixed zone but really as this gradient of inhabited landscapes, productive landscapes that are supported by networks of energy resources, capital and of course, which intentionally or not produces social inequality. So we really try to look at design as an activist tools-based project and also a kind of a critical look at urban systems and forms. These are some of the bigger kind of looks at what we try to encourage that you to learn and how to address these challenges. We're really advancing systems thinking. We're really trying to not shy away from the complexity of urban systems. And we encourage our students to try to develop ways of representing and communicating that complexity. We're driven by engagement and interaction with people on the ground. We have a whole seminar and a lot of studio work devoted towards forms of engagement and interaction with communities. We really see design as kind of part of this co-creation process and we are actively collaborative. We have a strong focus on storytelling, narrative building and visualization. Your summer semester, for example, will have a lot on history theory but also telling stories and interviewing people, learning about how people define their neighborhoods and how to build narratives to try to push an urban design transformation. And then we are very much driven in a history of a very strong humanitarian ethos. This is a snapshot of a kind of a review, if you will, a typical design review. And I include this, well, there's some of the faculty that you'd be interacting with, Nans Voron, Sagi, who are our co-leaders of the summer studio, for example. And I include this just to say that urban design at Columbia is a design program. It is not planning the results of your work in the studio semester will not be written reports, so to speak. They will be design concepts and design projects, as you can see here on the wall. And also the students presenting also are a great kind of just window into what the student body is like. So from moving from left to right, we have a student from Italy, Turkey, Philippines and I believe Ecuador. So we also very much go out in the community in New York City. We see New York City as our learning lab and teaching lab. This is a picture I took from one of my seminars where I took students out, you can see the drawing in the foreground to in the streets of Manhattan to understand what lower Manhattan is doing relative to coastal resilience and the transformation of the city at the water's edge relative to reacting to and Superstorm Sandy which is a hurricane that hit our region and then also how we're projecting forward. So we really see New York City as our learning lab and so we're learning from the designers here. We're out on boats, we're in the neighborhoods. We are really bringing that work back to Avery Hall. This is an image of Ware Lounge, one of the classrooms where in this case we transformed it into an exhibit about the spring studio work at graduation time. So it's really a chance to be both in New York, out in the world and then we work in Avery Hall and Fairweather to kind of develop our kind of urban design strategies and visions and describe them. So I'll go through our pedagogical goals and the program structure which I think is actually incredibly clear. We have studios and seminars and so the studios are very clearly sequenced in this format where you would be arriving in New York City and actually just a couple of months which is super exciting but we launch our program in June with the first studio which is basically one big kind of class focused on the lens of New York City with Professor Sagi Golan and Nans Barron, both of whom Sagi is a senior official in our New York City Planning Department and Nans is a senior designer at Scape and basically they will sort of lead you through this synthetic first studio that integrates design theory and a number of different courses. Your second studio kind of anchor studio is focused on the urbanized region directed by Professor Emmanuel Admasu and then the third is literally looking at the global scale and global cities and climate change and that is directed by me. So this first semester is really looking at the New York City, how it works, how it's formed and the pedagogical frame, the site systems, neighborhoods and stories. So you'll be really out on the ground walking around New York with your instructors meeting people, learning from how the city evolved and was formed and here you can see a map of New York City in the background, that's Jamaica Bay and that's Manhattan Island. You can see a kind of a collaborative work process and in many of your classes like this one, Reading New York Urbanism, it's also focused on, this is a student Donovan on the left interviewing a part goer and you'll be kind of learning how we think about urban design and how we begin to engage community members and to interview and to learn about the city through the lens of its residents, not from a kind of abstract mapping process. You'll take that work back into Avery and discuss it in a wide context and the New York, the first class is really, the first studio in the summer is really one big class and all of your coursework from software to history and theory is all integrated into one integrated kind of tools based learning program and it really brings all of you, which you'll have degrees from different universities from all over the world, kind of to a similar sort of point of beginning. The second studio semester, the second semester begins in September and this studio is really focused on the lens of a larger scale regional change. Led by Professor Emanuel, its focus is land, property, race, ecological politics and social infrastructure. And this is here are kind of two views into the studio which has been called Atlanta After Property, the teaching instructors and the kind of pedagogical statement here on the right. And the past two years, the studio has been looking at Atlanta and traveling to Atlanta, which is incredible, just like New York, a kind of a laboratory for understanding new forms of urbanism and student work. And this semester ranges from kind of retrofitting public spaces to trying to densify or kind of suburban communities, but with a greater emphasis on social infrastructure and connectivity to thinking about new forms of micro economies and to other larger scale urban transformations. And so as I mentioned, you can go on our urban design webpage and scroll down to studio publications and you can get a look and greater detail to add some of this work. And here's just some screenshots from the studio design report. And obviously this is a great tool for prospective employers. And finally, before I turn it over to David to talk about the seminars, the third studio, which is what Rhea and Dee are in right now, the third and final semester studio is focused on global cities through the lens of climate, water, informality, ecosystems, resilience and social capital. And those topics also have to do with the suite of the teaching team and the teaching teams expertise and what they bring every semester. For the past eight years, we've been conducting these studios under the lens of water urbanism, which we describe as a generative framework for urban studies that foregrounds water, site, context, people, ecosystems and territory. And here's some of the cities that we've visited in the past couple of years and from, they're quite diverse from Madurai, India to Varanasi, to Beora, Mozambique, to Quenta, Vietnam. And we also are getting more ambitious linking up these cities in broader geographies. For example, we were in the Great Rift Valley and students went to Tel Aviv, Addis and Ababa in Ethiopia and Beora Mozambique. Not everyone went to every city, but the studio was sort of elected to pick one of these cities and traveled. And then we talked about them as a cluster. And here are two most recent ones in Belize looking at the imperiled Belize barrier reef and urbanization patterns in Belize city and across the chain of islands. And just some snapshots of what that experience is like for you as students on the ground. So here you can see there's myself and Professor Gita Mehta, Professor Thaddeus Palowski, some students and local officials describing plans and initiatives later in Pune. This is also just a snapshot of what those trips are like. We have symposia, we meet and we always work with students and at our kind of fellow universities and develop student to student exchanges. We do sketches, we present our work back and then we celebrate that's the bottom right hand corner. And here's just another snapshot into some of the student work that has come out of the spring semester. And the trips and these trips in the field visiting activists, meeting with professors, et cetera are really a highlight of the year. And the student work ranges from the urban from the scale of the plaza up to the scale of the territory. As I mentioned before, that was a view of Amman Jordan kind of a concept of some students developed. And the scale was a map that students made about the oncoming obsolescence of water infrastructure and the imperiled kind of state of water in Jordan. I'll just flip through these because I think that that's probably enough on the spring semester. David, over to you to talk about our seminars. Okay, hello everyone. The urban design program has a semester, you have to take one of three required seminars in the fall and spring. You also have room in your schedule to take electives which we encourage you to do in the school or anywhere in the university. So these are recent seminars, which one of, like I said, in the fall and spring you take one of three each semester. And so they cover a lot of territory, a lot of subjects, a lot of approaches, whether it's public space or design and difference, which is about class and race, resilient cities focusing more on case studies and examples of how cities are dealing with climate change. We have Human Rights Seminar, which is taught by one of our history faculty. Global Street Design is a kind of, there's so many practitioners looking at the kind of specifics of Street Design, which several of our members, our faculty members actually are the writers of the US and the international codes for that. And I teach a class on new towns and smart cities. And so there's a good range and there's always something to take. The electives, you'll have room in your schedule to take electives in Avery Hall as well as across the university. So there could be more software related things about information modeling and data mining. And then there's more social justice and conflict, urbanism related classes. Again, continuing with ecology, seed bombs and then kind of more kind of planning and zoning type of classes. There are classes at the climate school, there are classes at the Earth Institute. Whatever you are interested in, we encourage you to find those classes. And one of my tasks is to help you find classes because every semester there's new things at the university, whether it's ecology or literature or film stories and film matters from different countries. There's just great electives across Columbia University and it's a really great opportunity that we encourage everyone to take a look at. These are just some snaps from different classes. This class that I do on public space and kind of contested nature that one of our professors teaches again about what happens when urban design meets communities. Justin Moore teaches a kind of joint class where he's working with students at Tuskegee University at the same time and there's a joint class. And then Graham Shane, whose book you may know, Urban Designs Since 1945, teaches a really interesting class on kind of global practices. And so this is just a quick look at a couple of those seminars and at any time I can tell you about more of them. Great, so just a window into student life that I'm gonna turn it over to the students to introduce themselves and Bianca as well, our recent graduate. But it's towards the end of the year, we have an end of year show, which is both an online exhibition and in some cases an installation and Avery Hall and fair weather. And so you get a chance to sort of see the work of all of Columbia and all of GSAP, which is really great because we're having increasing collaborations with planning, with courses in elsewhere and maybe Dee and Ray, I can talk about our work with the climate school students this semester. And I wanted to just close before I stop sharing and ask the students to say hello. That a big part of the MS and Urban Design Program at Columbia is the sort of celebration, if you will, that great work emerges in the space between people. And it's kind of a critical mindset shift to take on as you move from thinking about practicing as solely an architect or solely as a landscape architect or solely as a planner and moving into the realm of Urban Design because Urban Design is truly a kind of a larger scale project, if you will, that involves collaborating with communities, clients, cities, putting visions forward and galvanizing action, right? So we're designing in many ways, the public realm, sometimes spaces that are forgotten or residual or thought of as in between spaces. And so similarly, we do aim to have our students work work in groups, the faculty is a team-taught faculty and it's both an exhilarating and incredibly rewarding process, but it really is something that mirrors the complexity of the world and in advancing Urban Design projects in the physical environment. So it's also a tool that prepares you to be a leader once you graduate and help to advance Urban Design initiatives wherever you choose to practice. So I'm gonna stop sharing there where you can, if you feel comfortable putting your camera on, you can do so. If you feel more comfortable leaving that off, that's also fine. And Bianca, I'm gonna turn it over to you and then Dee and Rhea. Hi, everyone, I'm Bianca. I'm really excited to meet all of you guys online here. I graduated last May in 2022 from the program. So really exciting to be out in the real world now. Currently, I'm working in the public sector. I work for the New York City Department of City Planning as an urban designer, specifically within the Brooklyn office. So yeah, I'm happy to answer any questions you guys might have and also I can provide contact information if you guys wanna email later on or anything like that. So happy to be here. Thanks, Dee, why don't you go? Hi, everyone. I'm Dee and I'm a current student. I will be graduating very shortly in May. I have an architecture background and I worked for a little bit in San Francisco. So I did this move like from coast to coast. And then another thing to touch off on, Kate, about group work. It's also about connections. And Bianca was my TA that semester and I have a lot of questions and Bianca is one of those connections that I still keep up with and interact with and ask questions. Great, Rhea. Hi, everyone. I'm also a current student in the spring semester and I am from India and moved here last May, graduating soon. And yes, happy to be here. And if there are any questions, please feel free to reach out. It's been a very rewarding journey. It may feel like it's a lot in the beginning, but it feels like it's going to all pay off. Thank you guys for joining. Have a great rest of your day and see you in New York. Bye-bye.