The Notre Dame graduate architecture curriculum provides every student with a foundational education in both Classical Architecture and Urban Design, and requires each student to choose a one-year concentration sequence of electives in either one or the other. Graduate Urban Design students are introduced to the formal principles of good urbanism in Rome during the first semester of their two-semester elective sequence; and in the second semester, at the Notre Dame campus, participate in a studio-based community design workshop in the course of which they are introduced to and engage the political, legal, and cultural frameworks of urban design in a contemporary American setting. Because working in smaller communities typically allows for greater local political engagement, these design workshops are often done in and with small towns, city neighborhoods, or other place-based communities, which in recent years have included Lewis University in west suburban Chicago (2006), Cooperstown, New York (2007), Northampton, Massachusetts (2008), Ventura, California (2009), Skaneateles, New York (2010), Lafayette, Louisiana (2013), and LaFox, Illinois (2014). In the aftermath of the 2009 Plan of Chicago centennial, the studios of 2011, 2012, and 2014 have revisited Daniel Burnham’s Plan to engage metropolitan Chicago to test whether (and demonstrate how) Burnham’s classical humanism remains capable of addressing contemporary urban issues, from the scale of the region to the scale of the neighborhood, block, street, and building. Students in the Fall 2015 studio will work on a proposal for the far north metropolitan Chicago town of Zion, IL in the context of the Chicago 2109 plan.