The Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning and LSA received a $1.3-million grant Monday from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The gift will fund architecture and humanities research on metropolitan issues in cities like Detroit, Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro for the next four-and-half years.

The Mellon Foundation delivered the “Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities” grant to the University, which supports scholarship and higher education at the intersection of architecture and the humanities.

The grant will go toward a new program in Taubman called “Egalitarianism and the Contemporary Metropolis,” which Taubman Associate Dean Milton S.F. Curry said will better educate student architects as to making the projects they’re working on “more accessible, more palpable and more positive as an experience for a variety of people.”

The program will include a large lecture course open to undergraduate and graduate students on urbanism, urban issues and egalitarianism in architecture. It will also involve two small seminar courses focused on post-industrial cities experiencing a decline in population, as well as growing Latin and South American cities like Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro.