Undergraduate Majors + Minors
As an undergraduate in the College of Environmental Design — the top-ranked public university for architecture and the built environment — you’ll be part of a creative community dedicated to researching, understanding, and redesigning the world around us to tackle the urgent challenges of our times. You’ll acquire analytical and creative problem-solving skills that prepare you for careers in architecture, planning, government, community development, and other fields where you can have a real impact on people and the planet. Each of our four undergraduate programs is deeply rooted in issues of social equity and climate resilience and equip you to reimagine and reshape the ways we live in order to create better futures.
Majors
Architecture
As an architecture major, you’ll join a community committed to collaboration, inquiry, experimentation, and design excellence. The major offers a broad, humanist introduction to the field of architecture, including theories of design, digital design and fabrication, the histories of places and peoples, and sustainable design practices. In this rigorous, hands-on, studio-based program, you’ll visit project sites, render your designs using the latest software, build models in the Fabrication Shop, discuss your work and ideas with local design professionals, and learn how transforming the built environment can be a catalyst for social change.
Landscape Architecture
As a landscape architecture major, you’ll learn both the art of creating beautiful places as well as how to think critically about landscapes from the perspectives of ecology, climate resilience, social impact, and cultural meaning. The curriculum offers opportunities to engage with a range of landscapes, from community gardens to downtown plazas to wilderness areas, and encourages you to reimagine how collective public landscapes can contribute to the common good. In addition to creating in design studios and attending classroom lectures and seminars, you’ll wade through streams, survey urban vegetation, observe construction sites, and sketch Bay Area landscapes.
Urban Studies
As an urban studies major, you’ll learn to lead change for better urban futures. The interdisciplinary curriculum introduces you to key issues in urban history, transportation planning, and housing. Lecture and seminar classes, plus a capstone experience, focus on cities as sites of economic development, civic participation, social transformation, and cultural imagination. At a time when the world is more urban than in other era in human history, you’ll graduate with tools and methods to make our cities more humane and resilient.
Sustainable Environmental Design
As an SED major, you’ll delve deeply into policy and design solutions that meet today’s environmental challenges, including pollution, food waste, carbon emissions, and land inequities. Taking courses across disciplines enables you to develop a critical understanding of how sustainable environments emerge from the intersection of technology, design, economics, policy, and societal change. You’ll graduate with a multifaceted understanding of how to drive systems change to create resilient, resource-efficient, healthy, and socially just cities and metropolitan regions.
Minors
City & Regional Planning
Gain an understanding of how cities function, how urban processes are researched, and how urban environments can be transformed through planning, policy, design, and social action. Open to all majors at UC Berkeley except urban studies. More>
Environmental Design and Urbanism in Developing Countries
Explore basic problems, cultural contexts, policy alternatives, and design solutions in the developing countries. Open to all majors at UC Berkeley. More>
Geospatial Information Science & Technology
Add skills of geographic information science and technology, along with geostatistics and analysis of satellite imagery, to your toolkit. These cross-disciplinary tools are used in academic research, industrial applications, and public policy analysis. This interdisciplinary minor is open to all majors at UC Berkeley. More>
History and Theory of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning
Explore conceptual issues of landscape architecture. Open to all majors at UC Berkeley except landscape architecture. More>
History of the Built Environment
A series of courses in history, architectural history, and cultural landscape increase your awareness to the history of the built environment. Open to all majors at UC Berkeley. More>
Social and Cultural Factors in Environmental Design
Learn about the political, cultural, social, and economic issues of concern to architects, landscape architects, and city planners. Open to all majors at UC Berkeley. More>
Sustainable Design
Discover how decisions made at various scales of the built environment (buildings, communities, land use patterns, urban support systems) can support environmental quality, social equity, and economic vitality. Open to all majors at UC Berkeley. More>
Undergraduate certificates
Berkeley Certificate in Design Innovation (BCDI)
Learn to take responsibility for the entire life cycle of innovation, from idea to execution and beyond with this certificate that meaningfully integrates methods, technologies, and knowledge from different disciplines. More>
Certificate in Global Urban Humanities
The Undergraduate Certificate in Global Urban Humanities provides a framework for the study of cities and urban life that brings together approaches from many disciplines, with an emphasis on approaches from the arts and humanities and the design disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, city planning, and urban design. More>