CityScope: New Orleans
MIT's CityScope: New Orleans is a project-based course that treats the city as a live design problem rather than an abstract puzzle. Working in teams, students assess real conditions in post-Katrina New Orleans and develop social, economic, and design strategies aimed at humane, sustainable outcomes. The course frames the distinction between solving problems that happen to be complex and solving problems within a complex urban environment, pushing students toward context-specific proposals instead of generic fixes. Coursework includes team assignments, scenario analysis, and design strategy development, with a planned site visit to New Orleans built into the syllabus. Materials come from MIT OpenCourseWare and include the syllabus and project structure used in the original classroom offering. No certificate is offered, consistent with OCW's open material format, but the full assignment sequence is available for self-study.