
This January, the day before the Los Angeles fires ignited, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced the newest phase of construction on the long-awaited California High-Speed Rail (CHSR) from San Francisco to Los Angeles, spanning the Central Valley. Neeraj Bhatia, a design critic in architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, explored with his students how the CHSR will transform the state by giving rise to what he calls a “territorial city” that “spans vast swaths of land to include both urban and rural settlements.”

Bhatia asked his fall 2024 option studio, which was sponsored by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, to consider how vulnerable populations in the Central Valley could benefit from the CHSR. The new rail system, he says, offers “an armature for accessing dispersed populations that have been underserved.” In October, the studio visited the Central Valley, with support from the Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Critics have cited failures of the CHSR such as its high price tag and long timeline, but, once completed in 2050 (as projected by the Rail Authority), riders will be able to cover the 350 miles between Los Angeles and the Bay Area in under three hours; it takes more than six hours by car and nine by conventional train. The CHSR is intended to be competitive with air travel and to help improve the environment—as well as quality of life—with less motor traffic and congestion. It will also, inevitably, change the communities connected by the system, according to Bhatia, by allowing “people to experience different cultures through living in geographies they are less familiar with, and trying to reckon with those differences to find points of empathy.”
California’s coastal cities are characterized by “scenic landscape, progressive environmental movements, and density,” Bhatia writes, “while inland California is characterized by resource harvesting and extraction, conservative values, and a depravity in social infrastructure.” Residents in the urban hubs are facing the affordable housing crisis, and, as we’ve recently witnessed in Los Angeles, worsening natural disasters. Meanwhile, with oil reserves and some of the richest soil in the world, the Central Valley’s bounty of tomatoes, lemons, peaches, walnuts, and almonds—among hundreds of other fruits and vegetables—are harvested by 55,000 migrant workers who help feed the nation.

These “two Californias”—urban and rural, progressive and conservative, dense and sprawling—a “microcosm of the United States,” have remained distanced from one another, but the CHSR will collapse their proximity, which Bhatia argues creates an opportunity to more equitably distribute resources.

Bhatia’s approach of designing to increase equity and accessibility rises out of his work as the founder of The Open Workshop in San Francisco, whose recent projects include “This Land is Your Land,” a “multi-resource cooperative” in the rapidly growing Tennessee Valley, a research proposal to provide affordable housing to diverse populations and increase broadband access. The firm’s 2021 Chicago Architectural Biennial project, “Decentering the Commune,” proposed a design for an urban commons in Bronzeville, making use of publicly owned vacant lots to provide a “network of sharing” between existing organizations, offering Chicago residents access to “food, making, ecology, and care” in ways that increase their autonomy. Finally, “Lots Will Tear Us Apart,” sited in San Francisco, a collaboration with GSD alumni Dan Spiegel and Megumi Aihara, reimagines mid-density housing typologies to “bridge lots,” catering to collective living.

In California, students had the opportunity to meet with representatives of the California High-Speed Rail Authority and visit a series of construction sites. On their return, Bhatia asked them to research a segment of the railroad, focusing on collective housing and centering opportunities for care; then, each student created their own speculative design for a station.
A Food Desert Amidst Farms

Ella Larkin (MArch ’26) and Connor Gravelle (MArch ’25) researched the Central Valley’s foodways, asking, “In a place with so much farmland, why is it so hard to get affordable, fresh produce?”

They found their answer by tracing food through the supply chain. The Central Valley harvest was first shipped to a massive consolidation center, such as those used by mass-market brand Walmart, which “aggregate goods on a territorial level before subsequent relocation to distribution centers.” Before produce reaches residents in the Central Valley, it is first shipped “upstream,” with several stops before it is transported back to a local markets, where its high price reveals the burden of its journey through a costly, time-consuming system.
Leveraging the speed of the CHSR, they designed a new system to allow fresh produce to remain in the Central Valley for longer, enabling new forms of access to residents at stops such as Kings-Tulare and Fresno.
Education on the Rail
Because educational amenities and funding are often equated to population size, people in the Central Valley face challenges in accessing educational opportunities.

Ziyang Xiong (MArch ’26) and Iam Bhunto (MAUD ’25) proposed two structures that center educational opportunities and include housing and healthcare. Finding that the Central Valley’s high school and college graduation rates are significantly lower than California’s as a whole, and that middle-skill jobs (which require more than a high school education but less than a bachelor’s) will be in demand in the coming decades, Xiong and Bhunto set out to create a new typology. To help people meet the qualifications for these jobs—for example, dental hygienist, computer technician, and EMT—they designed a “trade school with diverse and extensive shared resources,” including education centers, housing that has co-living options for students and families, and shared amenities such as a workshop and a gym.
Housing for Migrant Workers to Put Down Roots
Chloe Tsui (MArch / MDes ’27) and Inmo Kang (MArch ’25) tackled the housing shortage that the Central Valley’s migrant farmworkers face throughout the year. In the 1970s, they explained, migrant workers typically consisted of “single men who left their families behind when they traveled to California for work,” but those demographics have long since shifted.

Today, most migrant workers are “intergenerational families” who live year-round in the United States—and yet, their access to housing is limited to six-month-long rentals at state-run housing centers. Tsui and Kang found that 83 percent of families said they would remain in the homes year-round if they could; some had returned year after year for the last five to ten years.

However, to qualify, they’re required to live at least 50 miles away from the farm for a minimum of three months every year—forcing them into continual displacement. Using the CHSR, the duo provide the opportunity for migrant workers to commute across the territory, allowing them to live in one stable location while building connections and social networks. At the Bakersfield and Merced stops, they propose a series of “physical and social infrastructures for migrants,” comprised of housing cooperatives, a community kitchen, and a community center.

As more and more regions across the US plan for and construct high-speed rail systems, California will serve as an early test for what will happen to populations whose geographies have shifted due to changes in infrastructure, time, and access.
Excavating background geographies, says Bhatia, reveals what our society values. “If you want to see our relationship to energy, labor, agriculture, food—key resources that sustain us—those negotiations play out in background geographies where people also often face different forms of precarity.”
Now, as immigrants in the Central Valley face the threat of mass deportations, many too fearful to show up for work, says the California Farm Bureau, and Los Angeles grapples with the massive destruction wrought by the fires, perhaps both these polarized populations—soon to be intertwined via the CHSR—can find mutually beneficial solutions through an armature for care and equity-centered design.