b'Urban Intensity & Urban designMessage from the Program Director:In our 25th year, we reflect on the qualities that have given the UNSW Master of Urban Development & Design Program its special identitya commitment to the double D integration of urban development and urban design, a critical engagement with the urban project from a spatial political economy perspective, a creative mix of continuity and change in the exploration of our pedagogical principles over two and half decades, and above all, a championing of the design dimension of city-making.ProfessorLeading up to its launch in 1995, the MUDD Program was conceived as a James Weirick response to the pace and scale of urbanisation worldwide unprecedented in human history. Although we knew that the curriculum would be engaged with Sydney as a continuing urban laboratory, we were convinced from the outset that Sydney had to be seen from a powerful international perspective. For this reason, we have welcomed students from 39 countries around the worldfrom Asia, the Americas, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Australasiaand have undertaken 53 international urban design studios, hosted by universities, city governments and major design firms from Beijing to Buenos Aires, New York to New Delhi. Embedded in this way, our engagement with urbanisation across the globe from a design perspective has been exciting, indeed exhilarating as the proportion of the worlds population in cities passed the 50% mark on its way to 70% by 2050. The driving force behind the program has been a love of cities. For some time, however, we did not have a clear, compelling definition of the city. We wrestled with Lewis Mumfords portentous words, a geographic plexus, an economic organization, an institutional process, a theater of social action, an aesthetic symbol of collective unity and the descriptive analyses of more recent scholars, dense interactive locations where knowledge is exchanged, innovations spurred and sophisticated skills developed (Mumford 1937, Harvey 1985, Henderson 2009). Then in 2017, the city was defined for us in simple, direct words in a brilliant lecture given at UNSW by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Alejandro Aravena, Co-founder & Executive Director of Elemental, Chile: the city is a concentration of opportunities (Aravena 2017).The Aravena definition, capturing the fundamental rationale of urban life, has inspired our MUDD25 theme: Urban Intensity | Urban Design, with 3P1-20200229-FOLIO INTRO.indd 8 2020/3/8 11:18:39'