This is a vertical studio combining advanced level undergraduate and graduate students who may choose from a diverse range of options of study proposed by different faculty members. The studio options are grounded in a conceptual basis that invites theoretical and/or programmatic innovation. These studio options vary from year to year.COURSE SECTION DESCRIPTIONEvery foreground has a background. In California, our background is the Central Valley—a flat landscape that is used to harvest and extract resources to support other regions. It is no surprise that within the State, the greatest political, economic, and cultural divide manifests itself between the coastal cities and inland valley’s hinterland regions. Coastal California adorns an image of scenic landscape, progressive environmental movements, liberal culture, and density, while inland California is characterized by resource harvesting and extraction, conservative values, and a depravity in social infrastructure.Separated by topography, wealth, race, climate, and pollution, these two California’s are emblematic of the increasing divide between geographies of immaterial labor/ resource consumption and the exploitation of land and communities to extract/ harvest these resources. While these ‘two Californias’ have remained relatively distinct, the ongoing construction of the high-speed rail infrastructure will produce a spatial collapse between these two worlds, and create a new world of its own—a territorial city.California has embarked on an ambitious plan to connect major population centers—namely the Bay Area, Los Angeles Region, and Sacramento—through a high-speed rail (HSR) network. Construction is already underway with estimates to have an initial 171 mile ‘Central Valley’ section in operation by 2030 and most routes running before 2033. The high-speed rail will move at speeds exceeding two hundred miles-per-hour, connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco in less than three hours. Due to the need for flat, inexpensive land to route this project, the high-speed rail is being constructed through the agricultural lands of the Central Valley. The territorial implications of the high-speed rail are far reaching—including the redistribution of populations, economies, industries, and ecologies—for the lands that run along and adjacent to its vectors. This will create a new form of territorial urbanization that has been termed the ‘megaregion’. The concept of the megaregion is not new, in fact already in the late 1960s, Greek Architect Constantinos Doxiadis posited the notion of a ‘world city’, which he termed the Ecumenopolis. While Doxiadis’ radical concept may at first seem absurd, its underlying principle was that cities are growing horizontally across the landscape, and eventually these clusters will join into a continuous mat of urbanization connected by infrastructure. Doxiadis’ theories have influenced several contemporary designers/ theorists from Lars Lerup’s notion of the continuous city, to Albert Pope’s research on the Megalopolis to Rem Koolhaas / AMO’s Atlas. In the latter, AMO terms the corridor between San Francisco and San Diego “sansan”, predicting its continuous urbanization. As the city goes from a megalopolis to a megaregion, a new type of urbanism is produced that has never been witnessed in the United States. To seize the opportunity of the high-speed rail, we need to unpack how it can do more than simply move people. How can it help diversify economies and ecologies? How can it create new relationships between once distant cities and their associated cultures/politics? How can the highspeed rail be used to redistribute resources more equitably across California? How can architecture and urbanism foster empathy between these two Californias? This studio will examine the design, impact, and opportunities of the High Speed Rail in California both at a territorial and architectural scale. While these infrastructures are large-scaled collective constructions, this studio is interested in how the design of the network for high-speed rail as well as the specific nodes provides a venue to empower new agents—human and non-human—into this once top-down system. 
 

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