URB_713 Metropolitan Design Elements Studio: ‘We the People: Capital City Urbanism in Washington D.C.”

The spring semester studio in the Master of Urban Design program engages a growing North American city at multiple scales to examine how urban public and private life can be re/shaped amid intense pressures of growth and development. This studio used Washington, D.C. to explore those dynamics, but with an added twist: political life. 

A nation’s capital brings compounded layers of complexity to the normal local-regional dynamics of city making, where the federal government competes for urban space. Washington, D.C. is unique as a major city; it is also a district serving the State, yet is not located within any U.S. state. Residents pay federal taxes, but do not have full elected representation in Congress. The familiar slogan “Taxation without Representation” found on every capital license plate summarizes the contradiction and frustrations of being unaccounted for in a capital center. How do designers navigate these exceptional, competing political-spatial-ideological needs and influences in neglected neighborhoods nested in a city “worthy of a nation”? The studio was focused on understanding the tensions and needs (and opportunities) of local life in a national capital city.

“We the People” takes on multiple meanings for design. Who is the “We” in D.C.? The 700,000 residents? Politicians and dignitaries? The 24 million tourists that visit every year? Or the nation’s subjects, including all of us? Design, planning, development, architecture, public engagement, and representation in the nation’s capital serves nested scales of investment, constituents, and agendas. 

The site for this studio was Poplar Point, a contested area in the crosshairs of nested planning agendas and other environmental constraints. Overlaid by extensions of Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s original axial ideals, Poplar Point is poised for development. Difficult to access, yet in proximity to the long neglected, historic Anacostia neighborhood, it lacks local services. The site forms a promontory at the foot of the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge—currently being realigned—across from the reinvented Navy Yard on the Anacostia River. At the time of the studio, Poplar Point hung in the balance with Congress, who approved its transfer from National Park Service to District ownership based on approval of a master plan, among other things. 

The Office of Planning worked with students, who met with them during a studio trip to the capital, and generously provided feedback during reviews. Students carefully mapped a full range of about 100 “stakeholders” on the site, from the National Park Service and National Capital Planning Commission to the nonprofit group Martha’s Table to different profiles of residents and native “critters” living in and around the site. Students developed framework plans to guide equitable, long-term ecological, transit, and policy formation on the site. They then created urban design proposals for the site within the broader framework.