UC Berkeley's College of Environmental Design (CED) offers immersive summer programs in architecture, sustainable city design, and landscape architecture. Explore how design fits into your future career and education at UC Berkeley, the top public university for environmental design according to the 2023 QS World University Rankings. CED Summer programs will fire your imagination, stretch your mind, and set you on the path to achieving your goals. Choose from several in-person programs, each five or six weeks long, beginning on July 1, 2024. No design experience is necessary!
- Design & Innovation for Sustainable Cities (DISC) for current college students of all backgrounds. You'll join with other college students from around the world to tackle the issues of climate change, urban health, and social equity through the design of the built environment. A multidisciplinary approach gives you the tools and expertise to craft innovative design-based solutions to the most pressing problems of our times.
- Three different Summer [In]stitute cohorts for young professionals with a bachelor's degree, and students finishing their bachelor's degree.
- [In]Arch: Immerse yourself in the foundational theories, philosophical principles, and technical practices of architectural design. Through studio instruction, faculty reviews, readings, and lectures, you'll be introduced to architectural design, discourse, and representation.
- [In]Land: Learn the fundamentals of landscape architectural practice through the process of making and experimentation. In a collaborative studio environment, you’ll engage with the concepts of ecology, public space, and sustainability at multiple scales of design.
- [In]City: Gain practical, hands-on experience in sustainable city planning and urban design through projects based on real-world situations in the San Francisco Bay Area. You'll develop in-depth recommendations, analyses, and proposals that address major themes of planning practice, including housing, transportation, and environmental justice.
About CED
The College of Environmental Design (CED) stands among the nation’s top environmental design schools. It is one of the world’s most distinguished laboratories for experimentation, research, and intellectual synergy. The first school to combine the disciplines of architecture, planning, and landscape architecture into a single college, CED led the way toward an integrated approach to analyzing, understanding, and designing our built environment.
CED was also among the first to conceptualize environmental design as inseparable from its social, political-economic, and cultural contexts. Its faculty and students have always seen environmental design as an exploratory spatial practice, aimed at creating forms of building, landscape, and urban plans that have yet to be imagined. At the same time, CED has historically emphasized environmental design as a profoundly ethical practice, co-produced through dynamic engagements with diverse communities, workers, businesses, and policy-makers.
Today's students have inherited unprecedented global challenges that could not have been foreseen when the college was founded in 1959. This legacy will require radically new ways to fashion the buildings, places, and landscapes that harbor our diverse ways of life. The mission of the college is to produce creative and skilled professionals to help craft built environments & are; ecologically sustainable and resilient, prosperous and fair, healthy and beautiful — whose logic, form, and materials we as teachers cannot yet conjure. We guide students toward a critical understanding of cities around the world, their architectures and landscapes, and their many layers of meaning. We educate students in the art of designing well-loved places that both nurture our senses and challenge our imaginations. We help students not only to acquire technical expertise but also to develop transcendent ways of seeing and refiguring the built environment.
A common thread linking most CED programs is the design studio experience, involving deep immersion in theory, technology, and real-time practice for diverse domestic and international clients. In the studio, fledgling designers take flight, becoming visual thinkers, critical observers, and systems scientists, often working with faculty and classmates from across the college’s departments and programs. This intense, interactive learning arena is the hallmark of a CED education, offering an unparalleled learning environment located at one of the nation’s top public research universities.
Vision
Ours is a college of transformational practices that shape resilient and equitable futures, with a reputation for excellence in design, research, education, and community engagement.
Our vision is to launch our graduates to be agents of change for environmental good, disrupting the practices that degrade our environment and accelerating pathways and practices toward resilient, healthy, and equitable futures.
Resilience and equity are this century's primary challenges. Science shows that climate impacts are getting worse – making the planet hotter, affecting well-being, and causing instability from floods, drought, and fire. How we live matters. We urgently need to redesign the physical fabric of our regions, cities, and neighborhoods to make them more adaptable to environmental change while proactively addressing social inequities and dislocations.
To do this, we need to look both backward and forward. The design and development practices of the late 20th century have exacerbated our current challenges. We must critically evaluate existing infrastructures, land-use plans, and buildings — this is the palimpsest in which we are intervening in order to redirect it toward a better future.
Understanding what worked, and what did not, enables us to promote new practices that build our collective capacity for adaptation, renewal, and equity.
Mission
Our mission is to advance knowledge and educate students in the critical theories, design practices, and sciences that address the environmental challenges of this century.
As part of a renowned public research university, in a region alive with entrepreneurship and located along the dynamic Pacific Rim, CED is well-positioned to make our mission actionable. This moment calls for a broad convergence — expansion of our impact on the public good through interdisciplinary teaching, research, community outreach, and industry partnerships.
Our degree programs focus on the formation of the environment as situated in a continuum of histories, societies, economies, materials, systems, and scales. We emphasize critical thinking about the ecological, social, and cultural performance of spaces, landscapes, and infrastructure systems. The diverse intellectual foci of our faculty’s research inform our curriculum and encourage exploration across the college's fields and professions. They all reflect global, multi-scale perspectives that broaden discourses while grounding them in lived experiences.
We aim to instruct and empower the next generation of environmental designers who will help to build better environmental futures, inspire and lead their professions, and serve our communities through practice and public service. Every generation seeks to make its mark, defining excellence anew. We are here to advance this.