The Undergraduate Bureau of Urban Design is a student run club, based at the University of Calgary that seeks to help students who are interested in Urban Design and related fields come together and explore the endless opportunities we have. Whether you are interested in Geography, Architecture, Landscape Architecture, City Planning, Environmental Design, Transportation Planning or any combination of these fields and many more, there is a place for you at the UBUD.
We encourage a multidisciplinary and integrative approach to problem solving and project production and therefore encourage students from all fields to come together and share their unique talents. By keeping the membership varied, we hope to maintain a strong and deep foundation for our members to stand firm upon.
Our major goals are to:
Create an open and welcoming place where students can get together and experiment. We try to foster creativity by encouraging members to get feedback from their peers which they can then use to tweak and hone their own strategies for solving the urban issues we all have to face. You will be able to develop lasting and fruitful relationships with fellow students that will hopefully become the basis of your future career. By working with students with various backgrounds, you will get a taste of what it is like out there in the real world where one group must work alongside many others to achieve their goals.
Give students opportunities to improve their design skills. We offer Design Workshops for students who are interested in developing their drawing, drafting and design habits. For those of you who have noticed a lack of such resources on campus, you will be pleased to now have chances to grow. We supply as much of the materials as possible to our members for these workshops. This levels the field so that even if you have no experience drawing, sketching or using computers, you will not be at a major disadvantage. Come out and increase your skill set and learn what may be the most important part of a career in Design.
Create, through team projects and personal effort, portfolio grade pieces for your personal portfolio. Many Graduate programs and jobs require a portfolio to accompany your application, but when there are limited opportunities in class to create these projects, it can seem daunting. Our Design Workshops and our Projects are meant in part to give you the concrete proof that shows that you are ready for the next level after you Bachelor degree, whether that means Grad school or work. The effort you put in here will be aided by your fellow students and will pay huge dividends for you later in life.
Foster networking, professional, faculty and personal relationships and reward successful teamwork. We do our best to bring in professionals from the community to give talks and answer questions for our members. This is meant to help our members begin to understand the depth and breadth of the fields associated with urban design. We will bring in faculty members as often as possible and these meetings may be the beginning of a life-long networking process that will leave you empowered and backed up to take on larger projects later in life. Your fellow students now will be your colleagues in the future. Meet them now and make your future happen.
