The Bight Studio: Pine Barrens, Power Brokers, Development and Displacement on the World’s Most Contested Coastline is a regional urban design studio in Columbia’s MSAUD program that confronts the intertwined crises of housing affordability, climate change, and displacement across the New York–New Jersey Bight. In partnership with the Megalopolitan Coastal Transformation Hub, a consortium of 13 institutions conducting research on responses to coastal climate change risks, the studio situates New York City not as an isolated metropolis but as one part of a larger, fragile regional system linking cities, small towns, suburbs, coastlines, marshlands and highlands. Students are asked to examine how historical development pathways—particularly car-centric suburbanization, exclusionary zoning, and centralized power—have produced today’s housing shortage, social inequity, and ecological vulnerability.
