The first cohort of the Urban Technology major, housed within the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, is set to graduate this May. The Bachelor of Science in Urban Technology, which was piloted in 2020 and began in Winter 2022, is the first of its kind.
The program provides a “future-focused” curriculum that incorporates urban planning with coding and city design. Bryan Boyer, director of the Urban Technology program, told The Michigan Daily the major is an ideal route for those who have a passion for city planning, but would also like to explore the technological side.
“When we talk about Urban Tech, I usually describe it as a degree for people who thought they wanted to study urban planning, or urbanism broadly, but also wanted to study computer science, and they didn’t want to have to choose one or the other,” Boyer said. “Our curriculum is cities, technology and design … plus understanding cities and their challenges and opportunities.”
Alongside workshops, career fairs and a developing curriculum, Urban Technology students are also given the opportunity to go on off-campus field trips. Taubman junior Emma Vitet, president of the Urban Technology Student Organization, told The Daily exploring midwestern Rust Belt cities with her cohort as part of the program’s hands-on Cities Intensive program was a transformative experience that brought their coursework to life.
“We took a spring semester and traveled around cities in the Rust Belt,” Vitet said. “We went to Chicago, we went to Cleveland and Detroit, met with professionals there, talked about their work and did a bunch of workshops.”
Taubman senior Enzo Mignano also had the opportunity to attend Cities Intensive, and said it was impactful for him to be able to connect what he has learned in the classroom to real life urban issues.
“It is a really great experience that adds another perspective to everything that I was learning,” Mignano said. “It really honed in on the fact that what we do in urban technology has a lot of real-world consequences. It directly affects the community. And no matter what we design, no matter what we put into the urban landscape, someone’s always going to be affected by it.”
Since Urban Technology is a fairly new major, there have been many changes in the past few years to improve the program, primarily driven by feedback from current students. Two significant changes include the removal of the minor requirement and implementation of a fall semester start for future cohorts, rather than the previous winter semester start. Robert Goodspeed, chair and associate professor of urban planning, told The Daily these adjustments were made in response to student input and the program’s rapid growth.
“We actually welcomed a cohort this month, and then we’ll be welcoming a fall cohort as well as we shift to the fall start,” Goodspeed said. “Because we’ve been expanding the courses and hiring faculty, we actually have adopted a new curriculum which removes the minor requirement and makes a few other minor changes.”
Vitet said she appreciates the faculty’s responsiveness toward student’s feedback on how the program can be improved.
“We talk to our faculty and our director at Taubman — in general, the people that are on board for (Urban Technology),” Vitet said. “So a lot of the things we bring up that face classes, about structure, priorities and course work, I’ve seen those things being implemented across the past three years, which is really nice.”
Daily Staff Reporter Chiara Dettin can be reached at chiarald@umich.edu.
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