Second Semester Architecture Core: SITUATE

The overarching pedagogical agenda for second semester is to expand upon the design methodologies developed in the first semester such that students acquire an understanding of the interwoven relationship between form, space, structure, and materiality. This semester extends the subject matter to include the fundamental parameters of site and program, considered foundational to the discipline of architecture. Through the design problems, students will also engage in multiple modes of analytical processes that inform and inspire the study of mass, proportion, and tactility.

Prerequisites: GSD 1101

The Gentrification Debates: Perceptions and Realities of Neighborhood Change

Gentrification and the real and perceived impacts that neighborhood change has on longtime local residents as well as new dwellers, is complicated to unpack and define. Many believe displacement is an inherent byproduct of gentrification, yet little research exists to quantify or even confirm if and how displacement occurs. We are left to speculate about whether residents being priced out of their rents; do owners chose to “cash out” and sell their properties; or do people of color chose to leave the neighborhood because the longstanding cultural character and amenities are eroding. So what definition of gentrification are we to rely on to improve our understanding of neighborhood change. The gentrification definition that relies on the statistics commonly measured by inflation in housing prices, increases in median household income, and changes in educational attainment, might confirm that neighborhood change through gentrification is real. Or what about the definition of neighborhood change as presented in the 2014 “Lost in Place” report highlighting that only 100 out of 1,100 urban areas saw reductions in poverty levels between 1970-2010, a change that may be a function of backfilling four decades of neighborhood population decline rather than the upward mobility of long time low-income households. This report is telling us we are obsessed with the wrong neighborhood change phenomenon– that instead of tracking the smaller percentage of urban areas that are truly “gentrifying”, we should instead be more focused on why the other 1,000 out of 1,100 urban areas and its residents are no better off than they were 40 years ago! This seminar will explore the debate about the causes and effects of gentrification and attempt to understand the real and perceived impacts of such change on the physical, economic, social and cultural dynamics of community. Students will prepare a debate position paper, offering a rigorous defense of both the positive and negative impacts of gentrification through the lens of multiple stakeholders (the gentrified and the gentrifiers). The course will use national articles on gentrification; neighborhood change measurement methodologies; examine a neighborhood using data research and field observation; guest lectures and panel discussions; and case studies on effective strategies for addressing the negative impacts and advancing positive impacts of gentrification. Graduate level cross-registration accepted

Creating Real Estate Ventures: a Legal Perspective

The course will examine how a commercial real estate deal is put together to move a project from conception to completion. The course will utilize research resources and actual transactional documentation related to the major stages of commercial real estate development such as (a) securing control of land, (b) sourcing and raising equity, (c) completing predevelopment steps including permits and construction and design agreements, (d) obtaining construction financing and building the project and (e) operating the project and realizing capital returns from refinance and/or sell.

Actual negotiated agreements used in each stage are planned to be analyzed, including project specific joint venture agreements, purchase and sale contracts, development agreements, construction and design contracts, construction loan agreements, major tenant leases, asset management arrangements and permanent loan agreements.

The course will include lectures, student participation in negotiation scenarios, student prepared presentations and exercises, guest appearances by experienced real estate professionals, and site visits to completed or under construction projects and the offices of lawyers and developers. 

The goal of the course is to enable students to get “inside” the deals that produces development projects and to understand major business and related complexities embedded in the various stages of development deals and how these complexities are often addressed and resolved.

There is no prerequisite for taking the course or any need for prior legal experience.

Urban Design for Planners

Course Objectives
This seminar course introduces physical planners to the approaches, techniques and tools of urban design necessary to structure the spatial and dimensional relationships of the built environment. Through an individual, Boston-based project, students will be required to give spatial definition and form to an urban district through the elaboration of streets, block and building morphologies, open space networks and typologies, and urban design guidelines. This course complements the first year Core Urban Planning Studios by concentrating on the design of urban spaces – informed by but independent of – the demands of quantitative analysis, decision-making frameworks, economic forecasting or the specifics of plan implementation.

Students in this class will learn urban design strategies for integrating form and program into a framework for research, collaboration, and communication. Students will gain familiarity with the technical tools and representational techniques essential for planners to portray development scenarios.

Methodology
The parameters for the site and program will be investigated at the outset of the course in order to begin with the investigation of urban form directly. The class will develop a spatial analysis of specific sites including but not limited to block patterns and parcelization, circulatory systems, open space characteristics, and relevant regulatory restrictions – easements, waterway setbacks, etc. Working individually, students will then create concept plans for specific interventions that will be elaborated throughout the remainder of the semester. The class will review urban design approaches for similarly scaled redevelopment projects, identifying relevant case studies from a range of urban design and planning practices. Students will develop their plans through the production of an urban design presentation board or boards that will include a street network plan, a public realm plan, a taxonomy of building types, three dimensional modeling of height and setback requirements and perspectival views conveying character. Techniques of representation will be customized by each student to align with their specific project approach in an acknowledgement of the relationship between representation and spatial or programmatic ideas.

Structure
The class will meet once per week, combining lectures, discussions and design reviews of individual students’ work. Grading will be based on successful completion of the urban design document described above. This course is primarily intended for first and second year planning students enrolled in the MUP program. Students outside this program may gain access to the class with permission from the instructor.

Implementation: Strategy, Management and Leadership: Lessons from the Field (at HKS)

This course will include both cases and readings that address the analytical challenges and the tools that are necessary to produce a successful implementation outcome. 

The course will begin by reviewing the analytical techniques available to assess the specific challenges of a specific project. The techniques will include analyzing the organizational culture, preparing a correct diagnosis of the problem or challenge and assessing the perspective in the political environment. 

Next, the course will review cases and articles that enumerate the management tools available to produce the desired outcome. These tools include mobilizing the bureaucracy, improving customer experience, project management, and executive leadership.

Finally, the course will take the previously described analytical and management tools to address implementation challenges like traffic congestion, increasing diversity, crisis management in response to an incident and a global health program.

The course is taught by Tom Glynn who has run or overseen a major subway system, a major seaport, a major airport, a White House Task Force and the operations of a U.S. Cabinet Agency. Glynn also has a Ph.D. from Brandeis University where he wrote his Ph.D. thesis on implementation. 

Note: Shopping Day Schedule for SES-5410/MLD-112 at HKS: Thursday, January 23rd from 11:45-1:00 pm in L280.

Urban Mixed-Use Development in Paris, FRANCE & Regeneration Project in Boston, MA

In today’s increasingly connected urban centers, shifts in cultural preferences, design thinking, and spatial significations often reflect and parallel transitions in capital forces and economic realities, locally and across the globe. This course begins with the premise that globalization imposes forces and tensions that directly impact the formation and production of the urban built environment, and that future real estate and design professionals will have a competitive advantage if they are well-prepared to understand, navigate, and lead amidst cultural and economic disequilibrium and disruptions of the global realm.

This project-based course encourages a forward-looking examination of and exposure to complexity in today’s real estate design, development and investment process. The course integrates domestic and international field studies, lectures, and class discussion, and encourages students to rethink, anticipate, and reinvent practice paradigms in both the real estate and design fields that respond to exigent and projected transformative environmental, market, economic and cultural changes, while fully leveraging highly-interactive, semester-long engagement with accomplished real estate and/or design leaders.

The pedagogical focuses of this course are two-fold: to provide practice opportunities in an academic setting for students to sharpen their professional skills required to traverse global contexts as culturally sensitive and professionally savvy practitioners, and, to establish an intellectual framework for students to understand and embrace the interrelationship between real estate and design so that creativity and design thinking become a value-adding and differentiating component in real estate thought leadership and development.

The interrelationship between real estate, design, and their underlying conceptual and production process are explored thus through thematic analysis of cultural underpinnings, artistic formal deliberations, economic activities, real estate market performance, ownership structures, private and public joint venture, as well as the efficacy of public financing.

    

Public Space as a Catalyst for Change in Informal Settlements: The Case of Argentina

How may we design transformative systems, tools, and frameworks to breach the gap between the formal and informal city through public space?

Shockingly, nearly 1 billion people (a quarter of those currently living in urban areas) reside in informal settlements that fail to meet their fundamental needs. In this context, it is urgent for designers and planners to explore understudied topics beyond dwelling and infrastructure, such as public space, which may challenge the existing notions of informality. Interventions in communal areas are often downplayed, but they may be
central in striving for equity and urban integration.

As a multidimensional aspect, public space is highly relevant when meeting the population’s needs, creating an equitable built environment, assessing decision-making processes, and enhancing community networks. Nonetheless, its significance and relevance in informal settlements is yet to be fully explored. For this course,public space interventions in the latter context are open-ended opportunities to compensate for individual shortages in the built environment by exploring frameworks for cross-scalar action, collective agency, emotional and cognitive development, environmental awareness, and other topics related both to individual and community welfare. It is a tangible realm to strive for equity and inclusion, one that is loosely defined nowadays when referring to informal settlements and that could be an entrypoint for planners and designers to imagine new systems of integration in the short, medium, and long-term. Therefore, the final outcome of the course will be for students to produce a methodological, policy, or design proposal, creating distinct toolsets to address the prior challenge.

The course will study Argentinian informal settlements, as it is part of a broader research effort led by the Inter-American Development Bank and Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Through readings, case studies, guest lectures, class presentations, and intervention proposals, students will be urged to engage with topics that are crucial for Argentina’s public spaces in informal settlements, such as the understanding of urban design patterns and the study of landscape, environmental, and social infrastructure. Results will be part of a publication planned for 2020, intended as a tool to complement local actions in the near future.

CoDesign Field Lab: Program Evaluation for Change Leadership

CoDesign Field Lab is a project-based research seminar (4 units) in which GSD students will work directly with Boston-based community, civic, and philanthropic organizations; planners; and designers affiliated with the Place Leadership Network (PLN) to support public realm strategies. A joint initiative of The Boston Foundation (TBF) and GSD’s CoDesign, the PLN comprises 8 teams including main streets, parks conservancies, business improvement districts, and CDCs. While these place leaders operate at varying scales, are located in different geographies, and serve diverse constituents, they share commitments to managing and stewarding public spaces in Greater Boston.

The research seminar will undertake a semester-long project of program evaluation as a means for compelling change at field and organizational levels. This will require critical reading and adaptations of relevant literature; collecting, analyzing, and visualizing data; strategic planning and implementation of program evaluation with partner organizations and consultants; and distilling lessons for others using arts and cultural programming to improve the public realm. The class will additionally discuss and reflect on challenges and strategies to promote inclusive, democratic, and vibrant public spaces within an urban and regional context of racialized, classed, and gendered im/mobility and access—as they concern the Place Leadership Network and The Boston Foundation and more generally speaking.

Learning outcomes include: (1) Critically analyzing and informing Boston-area public realm interventions by place-based partners; (2) Conducting national field scan of place-based funding programs;  (3) Co-creating program evaluation with partner organizations; and (4) Understanding possibilities and limits of program evaluations to compel change. Course enrollment will be limited to 12 students. Course qualifications are as follows (students must meet at least two): experience with qualitative and/or quantitative research, ability to work effectively as part of a collaborative team, strong technical writing and verbal skills, ability to prepare maps/graphics, and/or experience with program evaluation.

Note: Course enrollment is limited to twelve students, all of whom must meet at least two of the following qualifications: experience with qualitative and/or quantitative research, ability to work effectively as part of a collaborative team, strong technical writing and verbal skills, ability to prepare maps/graphics, and/or experience with program evaluation. 

Up to four students are eligible for priority enrollment. Those who are interested in this option should email the instructor, Lily Song ([email protected]), a CV and brief statement of interest (highlighting relevant experience, skills, goals) by Wednesday, January 15, 2020. Priority enrollment students will be notified of selection on Friday, January 17th, and will need to select the course first in the limited enrollment lottery in order for their enrollment to be prioritized. 

Urban Design and the Color-Line

“History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise, we literally are criminals.” – James Baldwin

We cannot talk about physical infrastructures in the United States without also talking about race. Questions thus arise about the main beneficiaries of infrastructure reuse projects: How are contributions to (or detractions from) the public sphere measured? Under what conditions might well-designed public spaces, ecologically-informed or otherwise, produce or strengthen urban inhabitants’ “right to the city,” and at what scales will such outcomes materialize? What other conditions – social, spatial, political, or economic – must also exist to ensure socially just outcomes through infrastructural reuse? In this research and design seminar students examine the role that race and class have played (and will continue to play) in the design and production of physical infrastructures. They engage the problematic either-social-impact-or-design binary in two fundamental ways: (1) Interrogating design’s contributions to, and complicity with, structural and infrastructural racism; and, (2) Developing intentionally anti-racist, equity-focused research and design methodologies that produce more equitable public spaces.

The High Line is New York City’s much celebrated – and in some corners, much reviled – infrastructure reuse project. Although the citizens who led the struggle to repurpose an abandoned rail infrastructure into a public park may not have fully foreseen the project’s larger gentrification risks, they soon understood these and other undesirable impacts. Reflecting on the High Line’s social and economic challenges, in 2017 Friends of the High Line (FHL) established the High Line Network (HLN), a peer-to-peer community of infrastructure reuse projects that spans the United States. Network partners at various stages of development lend their technical assistance and advice to one another about how to advance equity in their respective communities. This “trans-local” advocacy network disseminates knowledge on avoiding failures and missed opportunities that plagued the High Line’s advocates from the beginning, ranging from ensuring social inclusion, managing gentrification to avoid displacement, institutionalizing public programming, and negotiating city revenues for project development.

In this project-based course, students will partner with HLN organizations and contribute to an Equitable Impacts Framework (EIF) pilot — a cooperative effort with the HLN, GSD CoDesign, and Urban Institute – conducting research, readings, writings, discussions, and producing graphic materials in collaboration with HLN partner organizations. It is organized into three parts with the expectation that students will work in pairs to sustain focus on two of 19 US-based infrastructure reuse projects:
– Part 1 – Cultures of Racism: Students will research histories of inequity in each city through the HLN’s six equity indicators, asking: Why are these six indicators important for assessing and addressing equity?
– Part 2 – Geographies of Racism: Students will map present-day manifestations of historically-based inequities in each city, with emphasis on dynamics of race, class, and power, asking: Which indicators are particularly relevant to each HLN city, neighborhood, and project?
– Part 3 – Infrastructures of Racism: Students will research examples of good practices in equity planning and development, incorporating goals that the HLN organizations have set for themselves and proposing equity agendas for, and across, HLN projects.

 

 

Community Development: History, Theory, and Imaginative Practice

Community development is a heterogeneous and contested field of planning thought and practice. The profession has generally prioritized people and places that are disproportionately burdened by capitalist urbanization and development. In the US, the dominant focus has been on personal or group development and widening access to opportunities, with a growing reliance on market incentives to deliver housing options and spur economic development. Yet for many communities at the margins, development has rather connoted practices of freedom— freedom from oppression and deprivation; freedom to enjoy one’s time, make choices, and experience life as abundance and possibility. Thus conceived, community development is less a question of remedial policy than acts of resistance, claiming rights and power, and strengthening collective ownership and governance capacity over productive infrastructures and resources.

The course begins with an examination of evolving patterns, drivers, and explanations of urban inequality and poverty and corresponding urban policy and planning responses— with a primary focus on the US but in comparative world-historical perspective. We trace the evolution of community development from the Progressive Era to the contemporary period, where global trends such as urban-based economic growth and the new urban agenda are pushing community development practice beyond the neighborhood scale to local, metropolitan, and even supranational scales. In critically analyzing community development concepts and strategies, the course pays close attention to the dilemma of race that has continued to define capitalism, politics, and spatial production in America as well as divided working class and progressive movements, including those defining the field of community development. We also draw insights from historic movements that have sought to change race relations in America in connection with global assaults on capitalism, empire, and patriarchy.

For students to further develop their own community development agendas and skills, the course is built around a speaker series and discussion sessions focused on applied practices and cases. Notwithstanding significant advancements in affordable housing development, social service delivery, and placemaking— the traditional mainstay of community development— the course focuses on emerging community development approaches such as transformative economic projects built on community-labor partnerships, anchor-based strategies, and cooperative ownership and wealth creation. It also surveys innovative sectoral practices focused on renewable energy, mobility and access, food justice and sovereignty, and art, culture, and fashion. Guest speakers will moreover include political organizers and leaders working to build intersectional movements that inform progressive urban policy and planning agendas and community development goals.

Course evaluations will be based on three assignments (blog entry or comic strip, semi-structured interview, and applied research project) and class participation. It has no prerequisites and is open to graduate students across different disciplines.