MUD 722 - WINTER 2025
MUD2
GRADUATE STUDIO II
MASTER OF URBAN DESIGNMUD 722 - WINTER 2025PROFESSOR
Cyrus PeñarroyoTECHNOKOLLEKTIV: Countering + Rebooting the University's Innovation Complex
Urban designers have become increasingly enrolled in the development of costly innovation centers, campuses, and districts promising to transform metropolitan areas through the commercialization of new ideas. These enclaves are designed to spur economic growth by bringing together researchers and entrepreneurs into spaces where market-driven creative exchange can occur. Despite their appeal, the efficacy of innovation centers and districts has yet to be substantiated, but that has not stopped prominent institutions and investors from supporting these risky projects. We need not look further than U of M’s controversial, multimillion-dollar plan to erect a shiny new “Center for Innovation” that promises to revitalize downtown Detroit...
A testbed for the development of counterproposals to the UMCI that deploy urban design and digital technology for the common good, this studio questioned innovation and rapid growth as design motivations. If technologies are indicators of shared values, what alternative technological paradigms could we put forward that deemphasize innovation and assign value elsewhere? If embracing technologies associated with the “sharing economy” is also accelerating ecological destruction, what other cooperative technologies could be introduced to promote ecological stewardship instead? If innovation districts are instruments of financial accumulation that bolster the commodification of urban space, what spatial models or practices could be advanced that recognize urban space as a common resource? Ultimately, the studio asked students to deploy urban design in a manner that holds U of M accountable for its behavior in Detroit.
STUDENTS
Elyse Cote, Shweta Chawda
PROFESSOR
Cyrus Peñarroyo
What if infrastructure - a city’s technological lifeline - wasn’t a hidden utility, but a visible stage for collective life?
“Undercurrents” confronts Detroit’s “black-boxed” water systems, buried by disinvestment and prioritized only in crisis - main breaks, shutoffs, flooding. The project reframes greywater, stormwater, blackwater, and potable flows as mediums for collective care, knowledge exchange, and respite. Terraces, amphitheaters, exoskeletal pipes, and vegetation choreograph water along a central adaptive spine, animating gardens, plazas, and everyday rituals.
By slowing urban tempo and resisting tech’s fixation on acceleration, the project positions care, repair, and reciprocity as the true undercurrents of Detroit’s social and ecological networks.
STUDENTS
David Vega, Nihkil Rakesh
PROFESSOR
Cyrus Peñarroyo
PERMADetroit re-imagines the Uof M's UMCI innovation district development as a living computational ecology, where cooperative technologies evolve from platforms of exchange into infrastructures of socio-ecological regeneration in downtown Detroit. Organized through courtyard clusters linking labs, housing, and public space, the project proposes mutually beneficial relationships between research, community, and landscape.
Here, lab economies are envisioned as civic engines—subsidizing public amenities, housing, and institutions through shared resource ecologies. By coupling adaptive reuse, regenerative material systems, and emergent building codes, the proposal treats construction itself as innovation: a framework for care, reciprocity, and resilient urban life shaped through collective growth.