Dear UPD alumni,
Warm greetings from Gund Hall. I hope you have had a restful and restorative summer.
Although I had the pleasure of meeting some of you at the Alumni Council Spring Meeting and at the American Planning Association annual meeting in Detroit, I have not yet met most of you. So let me first introduce myself. I am Rachel Weber, and I became chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design last summer. You can read more about me here.
A few people have remarked on my less-than-excellent timing; I arrived at Harvard just as higher education is confronting extraordinary political and financial pressures, including the university receiving some unwanted attention from the federal government, uncertainty around international student visas, and an endowment tax. But I am thrilled to be here. The Graduate School of Design is a vital and ambitious place, and UPD is a remarkable community within it.
Our professions are at a critical juncture. Cities are confronting rapid and interconnected changes in climate, housing affordability, infrastructure, technology, and governance. These challenges require professionals who can move between scales and established disciplinary perspectives.
This is one of the great strengths of UPD. We attract extraordinary students who want to become planners, designers, developers, policymakers, researchers, and leaders in a rapidly changing urban world, and they want to work across professional silos. We give them a rigorous education that is both pragmatic and creative, combining technical capabilities with our longstanding commitments to design excellence and public purpose.
I am delighted to share a few highlights from the year below.
Learning by doing
Students learn by making, collaborating, iterating, representing, and engaging with real-world problems. This year, studios took our students to places as different as Nuuk, Greenland, Mumbai, India, and Kigali, Rwanda, where they worked with local partners to imagine infrastructures that circulated new natural resources like glacial flour, sustainable portside development, and wetlands restoration. They wrote theses on urban development projects and spatial governance in Bhutan, Korea, and Peru. They experimented with clean-energy grids superimposed on Boston. They negotiated public-private redevelopment scenarios to expand housing and commercial opportunities in Somerville. They analyzed the financial feasibility of adaptively reusing an office building in San Francisco.
These projects demonstrate our belief that analytical rigor should inform our spatial imaginations.
Our students are also receiving recognition beyond Harvard. Among this year’s accomplishments:
- APA Student Planning and Design Competition: Teams of UPD students were finalists and received an honorable mention.
- ASLA Student Awards: Students from Urban Design and Urban Planning received an honorable mention.
- 2025 Buildners Unbuilt Award: In this second annual international competition, graduates from the MRE program, as well as graduates from other GSD programs, won first prize in both the small- and large-scale categories.
- Impact Investing in Commercial Real Estate Competition: Urban Planning students received second place.
- MITdesignX Accelerator Program: Two Urban Planning students were part of a winning Harvard-MIT venture team, winning the 2026 Social Impact Award.
- Urban Planning students won the APA Foundation Diversity Scholarship and the ACSP Don Schön Award for Excellence in Learning from Practice.
- 2026 Community Service Fellowship Program: Ten UPD students spent the summer working with public agencies and civic organizations in Boston, Revere, New York City, and other parts of New England. Many students also won Bloomberg Fellowships to work in municipal governments across the country after graduation.
- Harvard’s Rappaport Public Policy Summer Fellowship: Three MUPs are 2026 fellows working with the Massachusetts Department of Energy, Boston Mayors’ Housing Innovation Lab, and MassPort.
Renewing the curriculum
We are thinking hard about what students need to know to work effectively in ever-evolving cities and urbanizing regions.
Among our curricular initiatives are efforts to rethink how we teach urban design methods, geospatial representation and analysis, and the use of emerging technologies like AI. We want our students to be fluent in the tools of contemporary practice without losing the capacity for critical judgment and persuasive argumentation that have long characterized our fields. We also are looking for ways to make the connections between our three graduate degree programs even stronger while preserving what is distinctive about each.
Faculty and research
The department continues to evolve as a community of scholars and practitioners. This year, we welcomed new leadership and new voices across the school:
Nestor M. Davidson is a leading scholar of real estate, urban law, property, and housing policy who is directing our Master in Real Estate Program. He has practiced law at Latham & Watkins, served at HUD, and chaired the New York City Rent Guidelines Board. He is the author or editor of several books and joined us from Fordham Law School, where he founded the Urban Law Center.
Avis Devine is a scholar of real estate finance, sustainability, and organizational strategy. Her research explores sustainable investment, climate risk, and workplace changes in commercial real estate. She has published extensively, advised industry organizations, and taught executive education programs worldwide.
Tim Love (MArch ’89) is the Lawrence H. Curtis MAUD ’83 & Marla G. Curtis Lecturer and Senior Fellow in Real Estate, Assistant Director of the Master in Real Estate program, and founding principal of Utile. His work focuses on urban design, zoning, real estate development, housing, and public-realm planning.
Li Hou (MDes ’05, DDes ’09) is a Lecturer in Urban Planning and Design whose research explores planning history, regulation, and comparative urbanism. With over 30 years of experience in China and the United States, she is the author of the award-winning book Building for Oil. She previously taught at Tongji University.
Flávia Leite joined us as a postdoctoral fellow as part of the 2026–2027 Pollman Fellowship in Real Estate and Urban Development. She recently completed her doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley; she researches housing policy and finance in the US and Brazil.
The Joint Center for Housing Studies soon will have an inaugural Retsinas Director, who will also be a Professor in Practice in our department. Learn more about the creation of this role.
Sadly, we are also saying farewell to several extraordinary colleagues upon their retirement: Joan Busquets, Ann Forsyth, Rick Peiser, and Peter Rowe. Each has made an indelible contribution to UPD and to the education of generations of students. We are grateful for what they have given the department and look forward to continuing to benefit from their ideas and engagement.
Looking ahead, we are developing more of a seminar culture in the department, including new research conversations around land and property that will bring together scholars and practitioners across the GSD who are working on some of the most consequential questions facing cities today.
A lively public forum
One of the pleasures of being at the GSD is the sheer range of people who pass through Gund Hall.
This year, we heard from renowned speakers including Deborah Archer, Kenzie Bok, Bill McKibben, and Nancy Fraser, among many others. MASS Design Group was recognized with the Green Prize for its design work in Rwanda, and members of MASS taught a studio there based on this work (see photos above). The Master in Real Estate lecture series brought leading practitioners and scholars to campus, while the Urban Analytics seminar series featured researchers working on the cutting edge of geospatial tools and analysis.
We are also continuing work through initiatives such as ReBuild (directed by UPD faculty member Maurice Cox, Emma Bloomberg Professor in Residence of Urban Planning and Design), the Just City Mayoral Fellowship (directed by UPD faculty member Toni Griffin LF ’98), and the Big City Planning Directors Institute, which bring together students, practitioners, mayors, and senior public officials around the challenges of governing and transforming cities. The Loeb Fellows have been offering exciting January-term courses on such topics as city sounds and public art.
Looking ahead
The coming year will be an important one for UPD. We will conduct three faculty searches, including a search focused on analytics and technology, as we strengthen our capacity in areas that will be increasingly important to planning, urban design, and real estate.
At the same time, we want to preserve what is distinctive about this place: an education grounded in design and spatial thinking, but open to new technologies, forms of analysis, financial and institutional arrangements, and ways of imagining the future of cities.
Which brings me back to you.
One of the extraordinary things about UPD is the range of work our alumni are doing around the world. You are leading municipal planning agencies, designing buildings and neighborhoods, developing housing, managing investments, shaping public policy, working in community organizations, building new technologies, conducting research, and creating entirely new forms of practice.
Our alumni community is one of our greatest resources. We would love to make it a more active part of the life of the department and of our students.
If you are in Cambridge, please come by Gund Hall. If you would like to mentor a student, attend a studio review, collaborate on research, or share what you are learning in practice, please get in touch.
I look forward to meeting many more of you in the coming year and to building an even stronger connection between UPD and our amazing alumni.
Warmly,
Rachel
Dr. Rachel Weber, Emma Bloomberg Professor of Urban Planning
Program Director, Master in Urban Planning
Chair, Department of Urban Planning and Design