Design for Real Estate
This course provides a comprehensive understanding of the role of design and design professionals in real estate, with an emphasis on the conceptual underpinnings of market-driven building types and their impact on both the design of individual buildings and large-scale redevelopment plans. The goal is to provide developers and owners with the relevant design knowledge and methodological tools so they are better equipped to conceive and execute distinctive, financially successful, socially responsible, and environmentally sustainable projects. The course will include lectures with class discussion, guest speakers, field trips to recently completed and in-the-works projects, short reading exercises, and an independent research project.
The course begins with an overview of the design standards that shape contemporary building types within asset classes as demanded by building codes, development regulations, underwriting benchmarks, market preferences, and the global standardization of building components and furniture systems. Understanding the rationale for the plan configurations and circulation armatures of specific real estate types helps clarify the role of efficiency metrics as key determinants of building design and the way that space is best configured to create future financial, social, and environmental value. The course also covers the market- and regulatory-driven logic of site planning, including the relationship between streets, blocks, and development parcels.
Beyond exploring the programmatic and spatial interdependency of the components that make up real estate, the course looks at a variety of methods for integrating financial analysis and design considerations especially when projects are being conceptualized. Students will be asked to explore approaches that balance risk mitigation, typically accomplished by relying on pre-existing models (“comps”), with more innovative approaches that aim to capture market share by defining new needs and audiences and proposing unprecedented but financially viable spatial and aesthetic configurations.
This is a required course for students in the Master in Real Estate program, but is open as well to urban design, planning, architecture, and landscape students who are interested in learning about the many ways that dimensional standards, efficiency metrics, capital sources, risk mitigation, and land values shape contemporary buildings and new urban districts.
Although this is a limited enrollment course, MRE students should enroll directly during the open enrollment period and not enter the Limited Enrollment Course Lottery.
Note regarding the Fall 2025 GSD academic calendar: The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 2nd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. This course will meet for the first time on Tuesday, September 2nd.
Analytic Methods of Urban Planning: Qualitative [Module 2]
How can planners develop a deep, systematic understanding of communities and places? This module explores the critical role of qualitative research in both planning practice and scholarship. Students will investigate how qualitative methods answer complex “why” and “how” questions, uncover different perspectives and lived experiences, illuminate local values, and help interpret unique, complex, and nuanced situations.
Emphasizing hands-on learning, the course guides students through the process of designing qualitative research projects tailored to community and organizational contexts. A range of data collection and analysis methods will be covered, including artifact review, place observation and ethnography, interviewing, group engagement, and visual techniques for both interpreting and presenting data. Students will also learn to use conceptual frameworks to organize qualitative evidence into compelling outputs, such as diagrams, case studies, scenarios, evaluations, and assessments. Students will leverage weekly exercises as an opportunity to practice and refine these approaches.
The course will equip students with practical qualitative research skills and critical analytical frameworks, laying a foundation for careers in urban planning and its related fields, where understanding people and place is essential for creating effective, equitable, and context-sensitive solutions.
Field Studies in Real Estate, Planning, Urban Design: Kansas City and Chicago
Developing Cambridge Crest overlooking downtown Kansas City, and Reconnecting Freeway-divided Chicago neighborhoods
The field study course is a 4-unit studio format class that combines design and planning with housing, retail, office, industrial, parks and civic development. It provides students with an understanding of the dynamics and complexities of real-world development challenges that create contemporary urban physical environments. The course emphasizes the integration of design, financial, and political feasibility for development of urban spaces that respond to realistic market demand and environmental, and other regulatory constraints–how financial implications affect planning and design, and vice versa. The course is intended for architects, urban planners, real estate students, urban designers, and landscape architects to engage in the process of large-scale urban development, combining private sector real estate implementation within a public sector framework. Students will broaden their understanding of urban development issues and public-private development implementation strategies, while refining their skills in master planning, urban and landscape design and financial analysis. Students will select one of two field studies to work on throughout the semester: (1) Designing and implementing a freeway cap over the Eisenhower Freeway in Chicago knitting together the neighborhoods severed by the freeway through urban design and redevelopment strategies; or (2) Designing and creating implementation strategies for a 40 acre parcel of land near downtown Kansas City bounded by freeways and close to the river. Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG), affordable housing, and public-private development will be central themes of the class.
Site visits to Chicago and Kansas City will take place from 10/6/25 – 10/10/25. 14 seats are included in the GSD Limited Enrollment Course Lottery – eight seats for Chicago and six seats for the Kansas City site. Students selected in the lottery will be prioritized for placement in the site visits to either Kansas City or Chicago. Professor Peiser will work with the class to assign sites and lists will be fully confirmed by the second week of classes. Cost to students who travel will be $200 (term-billed) plus meals and incidentals. The course is unlimited enrollment and open to students who do not wish to travel..
Note regarding the Fall 2025 GSD academic calendar: The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 2nd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. This course will meet for the first time on Tuesday, September 2nd.
Analytic Methods of Urban Planning: Quantitative [Module 2]
This course introduces students to quantitative analysis and research methods for urban planning. The course begins with an examination of how quantitative methods fit within the broader analytic landscape. It then exposes students to basic descriptive statistics (including measures of central tendency and dispersion), principles of statistical inference, and a wide variety of analytic methods and their practical application. By the end of the course, students will be comfortable with many analytic techniques relevant to urban planning and policy, including: z-tests, t-tests, ANOVA, chi square tests, correlation, and multivariate regression. On a broader level, students will gain the ability to understand and critically question the kinds of analyses and representations of quantitative data encountered in urban planning and allied disciplines.
The aim of the course is to introduce students to key concepts and tools in quantitative analysis and research. Most importantly, however, the goal is to develop students’ intuition regarding data analysis and the application of statistical techniques. By the end of the course, students will be familiar with how common techniques of quantitative analysis can be applied to a wide variety of data. Students will also gain a sense of the strengths and weaknesses of quantitative data analysis and under what circumstances the tools learned in the class are best applied in practice. The course seeks to train technically competent, intellectually critical practitioners and scholars who are able to apply quantitative methods in a wide range of settings, and who are also aware of the wider analytic context into which these approaches fit. There is a focus throughout the course on epistemology and the ethics of claim-making. Over the course, students will deepen their understanding of how claims are made, how claims are connected to different forms of evidence, and what makes different kinds of claims credible.
Land Use and Environmental Law A
As a scarce and necessary resource, land triggers competition and conflict over its possession and use. For privately owned land, the market manages much of the competition through its familiar allocative price-setting framework. However, because one person’s use of land affects individual and collective interests and market mechanisms alone do not always protect or promote such interests, laws enacted by legislative bodies, administered by government agencies, and reviewed by courts have arisen to fill the gap.
Encompassed in local ordinances, higher-level legislation, administrative rules, discretionary government decisions, constitutions, and judicial opinions, land use laws and environmental laws significantly shape the built and natural environment. For example, zoning’s use and density restrictions affect whether neighborhoods are demographically diverse or homogeneous, its height and setback restrictions sculpt the skyline. Environmental laws govern the extent to which land uses pollute air, water, and land, whether habitat is available for endangered species, and whether wetlands are preserved. Recent legal responses to climate change involve considerations of whether and how individuals may build or rebuild in areas vulnerable to floods, severe storms, heat waves, droughts, and forest fires.
Through lectures, discussions, readings, and a written exercise, this course provides students with a working knowledge of land use laws and environmental laws, the institutions that create, implement, and review them, and the issues that swirl around them. The course distinguishes law’s method from those employed by other disciplines and fields. The role of non-lawyers, including urban planners, designers, public policymakers, real estate professionals, and community activists in influencing, drafting, and implementing land use and environmental laws, is explored.
No prior legal background is assumed. Students with a legal background have found the course instructive. For pedagogical reasons, laws employed in the United States will be the main references, but comparisons with laws in other countries will be regularly made. Reading assignments are drawn from primary sources (legislation, constitutions, judicial opinions) and secondary sources (law review and journal articles, book excerpts, professional reports). The written exercise asks students to critically examine one provision of a zoning law and draft its replacement. An oral final exam will test overall fluency with course subject matter.
There are two offerings of Land Use and Environmental Law: 5206 taught by Jerold Kayden and 5207 taught by Nestor Davidson. Students cannot take both courses for credit.
Note regarding the Fall 2025 GSD academic calendar: The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 2nd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. This course will meet for the first time on Tuesday, September 2nd.
Real Estate Finance, Development, and Management
This course teaches the fundamentals of real estate for all major property types and land uses. The course begins with a focus on real estate finance tools. Methods of using discounted cash flow analysis for income property, for-sale property, construction and permanent mortgage loans are explored. Acquisition and management of existing real estate assets are similarly explored. The course culminates in a study of the various stages of the development process, including site selection, market analysis, financial feasibility, design considerations, legal requirements, construction oversight, leasing and lease-up, operations, and ultimate property disposition. Teaching cases and simulations are designed to place students in decision-making situations commonly faced by real estate professionals. Optional review sessions focusing on real estate financial analysis will support the course.
Although this is a limited enrollment course, MRE students should enroll directly during the open enrollment period and not enter the Limited Enrollment Course Lottery.
Note regarding the Fall 2025 GSD academic calendar: The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 2nd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. This course will meet for the first time on Tuesday, September 2nd.
Advanced Reverse Design and EMBODIED CARBON
At a time when urgent action is needed to avert the climate crisis, it is very difficult to take an idealistic approach when considering key materials in building construction. We now know that transformation of the built environment is inevitable. Designers can play an important role in the race to de-carbonize the built environment and this course is founded on real current examples. We will touch on how we got to where we are and how we can move forward in practice with the lessons we have learned by illustrating what transitions are already in play. Through a series of conversations and presentations, including from external experts, we will engage in inversing the design process by utilizing newly available tools. We will demystify regulations, terminology, and popular language, and examine how the predominant materials for construction, which are unlikely to go away soon, can be improved and implemented in design and construction to promote a low carbon economy.
Adaptive re-use, retrofit, recycle, regenerative design, conservation, resilient development: these are just some of the common and generic terms that need to be more closely understood in the context of other processes that are now emerging in practice. To do so, we need to trace previous understandings of methods and construction. The city as an object has a rich history of being constructed and reconstructed. We need to grasp the progress that has been made in construction throughout history and retreat from relying on theoretical works alone where formal concerns dominate.
The course will offer opportunities to discuss evolving technologies, periodic advances in codes of practice, shifts in material supplies, and “hacking” policies and regulations where possible. At the same time, we will consider an amalgam of building types in continuous transformation as the city builds upon itself, and new cities rapidly emerge in the Global South.
Many ancient methods are going through an accelerated revival where capacity, building codes, and technical specifications, such as fire and acoustics, empower architects to take back control as Design Team Leader. But we must also resist demonizing the more recent materials without looking at how to “clean” them. Consequences to embodied carbon, social interaction, maintenance, durability, textural qualities, tactility, heat absorption parameters, insulation, and indoor air quality come into play. The Architect is trained and skilled sufficiently to predict and control these variables. The course will cover supply chains, procurement, and crafts, and touch on specific cases that work towards “reversing” the steps taken over the last 100-1,000 years.
The seminar will be held both remotely and in person with some international experts joining in remote presentations. You are expected to attend all class meetings. See the course syllabus for details regarding the schedule.
Quantitative Aesthetics : Introduction to Machine Learning and Perceptual Machines for Design
This course aims to introduce students to concepts and techniques from Machine Learning and Computer Vision as a way to revisit questions of perception and aesthetics in the context of an AI mediated world and with its implications for creative work. Rather than focusing on large language based generative AI models we are going to explore the design potential and implications of some of their constituent components and the frameworks that enable them. Through a series of workshops and small projects student should develop an intuitive understanding of how model architecture, dataset curation, training and inference work and what are the opportunities for injecting creative intent beyond the use of language and prompt manipulation. The emphasis will be placed more on the perceptual capabilities and idiosyncrasies of ML models with some forays into proto-generative processes.
We will start with simple language embedding models to discuss the structure and operations on vector spaces that underly most ML applications. We will later introduce the classifier and autoencoder models as two archetypes of artificial percpetion and building blocks of other models. Through a series of targeted projects students will train and deploy these models to use them as surrogate perceptual systems that can curate, filter, organize and ultimately modify visual content.
The course will start with a brief introduction to Python and the relevant development environments and workflows. The ML library Pytorch and the Computer Vision Library OpenCV will form the basic technological stack.
Note regarding the Fall 2025 GSD academic calendar: The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 2nd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. This course will meet for the first time on Tuesday, September 2nd.
Water, Land-Water Linkages, and Aquatic Ecology
GSD 6333 covers water across the globe in relation to (1) land-water interactions, emphasizing hydrology and water quality, (2) aquatic ecology, and (3) human activities, including design questions and methodologies. While the course will focus on fresh waters, there will be limited coverage of near-shore coastal waters and coastal wetlands.
This course will provide students with an understanding of water that will inform their professional approaches to landscape architecture, architecture, and planning, and contribute to protecting, improving, restoring, and sustaining water resources. Emphasis will be placed on both the science and the application of this science in designs for projects involving a wide range of interactions with water including coastlines, inland rivers and lakes, and urban stormwater. With ongoing global changes in climate, urbanization, and the use of water for energy and food production, the relationship between humans and water will continue to grow and evolve. We will learn about environmental and land justice issues and think about their relationship to our design work. We will learn from members of the Indigenous communities about the importance of land, water, and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). Students will come away from this course with a better understanding of our evolving relationship with water and the environment and how designs can account for hydrologic change and adaptation while also considering the local communities in which we work. While many varied case studies from around the U.S. and internationally will be discussed throughout the semester, much of the course content and assignments will involve hydrology, stormwater, and sea level rise in the Charles River and Boston Harbor; river and wetland restoration in Plymouth, MA; and stormwater and low-impact design in Washington, D.C.
Discussion of these focus areas will include design challenges, social issues, permitting, and the implementation process. Students will come away with a better understanding of how projects go from conceptual design to a constructed site. Students will be encouraged to bring water and ecology-related projects/challenges from other courses, studios, or projects to the class for an open discussion. Hands-on exercises include watershed delineation, hydrologic calculations to estimate runoff and groundwater infiltration and flow, design exercises developing recommendations for stormwater best-management-practices/low-impact design (LID) for a neighborhood in Washington, DC, and research and design exercises for river restoration projects. Multiple classes will have outside activities or visits to nearby river, wetland, and water-related sites, including the Alewife stormwater facility, Alewife Brook, and the Charles River. Attendance at 2 all-day Saturday fieldtrips with hands-on field sampling will be mandatory: one will be focused locally on an aquatic system near Harvard; the other will be in Plymouth, MA. A semester long group project will focus on the sites visited during these fieldtrips and will culminate in a conceptual design of restoration and revitalization.
Evaluation: Based on class attendance and participation (including field trips), short written assignments, quizzes, focused design exercises, and a semester-long project.
Climate by Design
The climate crisis is here now and for the foreseeable future. For designers who shape the built environment, there is an urgent need to respond to the changing climate with greater understanding, sophistication, and imagination. To do so requires a community of learning committed to deeper analysis of the patterns of change and the potential roles designers may play in reducing carbon emissions and adapting to the many changes the future will bring. We must ask critical questions and interrogate existing systems of knowledge. What is climate change? How can designers approach it? What are the design strategies? How effective are they? Who do they serve? And on what terms?
The effects and burdens of climatic change are unequal, contributing to increased social and economic disparity and often exacerbating historic patterns of inequity. The impacts are multiple and diverse, as are the many cultures and communities that must respond and adapt. Therefore, a universal, one size fits all approach is not an adequate response. To develop design tools that respond to these conditions, we need to understand not only the science, but also the political, social, economic, and cultural contexts on the ground, where design projects and movements are rooted.
Through a series of lectures and case studies, this course will explore the range of paradigmatic design responses to the climate crisis. This foundation will be built through a series of lectures and panel discussions by GSD faculty and external experts across a variety of fields. We will engage in discussion together and with these invited experts to advance our knowledge and interrogate existing practices.
Over the the semester, students will engage in the analysis of a case study, advancing methodologies for critical assessment and visual representation. The studies will consider social, cultural, and aesthetic dimensions as well as environmental function, economic deployment, and political engagement. These exemplary cases will be a means to understand and articulate the evolving role of landscape architecture and related disciplines in designing for an increasingly vulnerable planet. As such, the course will explore not only how landscape architects respond to the climate crisis, but what these actions say about the nature of design itself. The cases will be situated in different geographical and climatic contexts, and the responses will be understood in relation to advances in science as well as variations in political, environmental, economic, social, and historical contexts.
Climate by Design is a required course for MLA degree candidates and open to other GSD and Harvard students with an interest in the climate crisis and design.