Landscape Architecture IV

Near-Future City

Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

This is the fourth and final semester for the core Landscape Architecture sequence. It questions ways in which we can design urban assemblages for the city during moments of deep and rapid transformation. The assemblages are explored as a basic “DNA” of the city in which urban, landscape and ecological elements are intertwined to imagine new ways of habitation for both human and non-human constituencies. 

This is an opportunity to speculate on a ‘Near-Future City’ that considers the city as a thick ground condition, one that describes a set of complex systems characterized by gradients between the static and the dynamic. Students will develop an understanding of the city and how it can adapt to future conditions.

The semester is structured around three phases of work: 01. metabolic flows and material processes, 02. urban assemblages for the near-future city, and 03. deployment and disposition of the assemblages.  The semester will begin by interrogating a particular set of systems at play in the urban environment and identifying key constituencies to be addressed. From here, the development and encoding of an urban assemblage is rigorously explored as an intertwined agglomeration of urban elements. Finally, in the last phase, students negotiate the formation of their assemblages in a sector of Boston.

The work will be guided by workshops, lectures, readings, discussions, and presentations. It will operate as a design laboratory through which different models will be tested and iterated. The work over the semester will culminate into a final exhibition and conversation surrounding the immediate proposals and the directions necessary for the responsible and ethical making of the Near-Future City.

Fourth Semester Architecture Core: RELATE

The fourth and final semester of the core sequence, this architecture studio tackles the complexity of the urban condition through the design of housing. From individual to collective, from spatial to infrastructural,  from units to systems, housing not only confronts the multiple scales of design but also exposes the values and ideals of its society. The semester will be an opportunity to imagine the possible futures of the city, recognizing the role of architecture at the intersection of the many interdependent as well as contradictory forces at play, and the negotiations that must necessarily take place. 

The semester will be organized in two overlapping phases. The first weeks will be an intense research and analysis phase through which the students will develop not only an understanding of historical precedents but also begin to formulate their narrative on urban living – a hypothesis that they will use to launch their design for the rest of the semester. While this hypothesis will be constantly revisited and revised, it will serve as a first speculative act.

The second phase of the semester will be devoted to the elaboration of an urban project with a focus on housing and will have as its objective the understanding of design as a series of relativities: between building and the city, between collective and individual, between civic and domestic. The architectural project is fundamentally optimistic. It goes beyond problem solving to imagining a better future. In no other typology is this more true than with collective housing which defines the core of how we live and function together as a society.

Pedagogically, working in groups and pairs will be a component of the semester, demanding dialogue, understanding, and negotiation of different points of view.

 

Second Semester Core Urban Planning Studio

The second semester core planning studio expands the topics and methodologies studied in the first semester core studio, GSD 1121, aiming to prepare students for the mix of analytical and creative problem-solving needed to be an effective planner. In this studio, students work on a real project in a real place (with a real client) that allows them to interact with the public; define a vision; collect, analyze, and represent data that supports that vision; develop a proposal that reflects public input; and present work in a sophisticated way that is relevant, legible, and useful to those who are not planners. By the end of the studio students will be familiar with a number of dimensions of community engagement, data analysis, plan making, and implementation.

Landscape Architecture II

Second semester core studio explores research and methods in the design of complex urban conditions: sites layered with multiple and uncoordinated interventions that present issues of fragmentation, ecological degradation, and the need for greater diversity of programs. Through several explorations in a public space of significant size and historical importance, this studio will extend the design methodologies of the previous semester (the overlay, the section, the complex edge) to include other concepts and criteria that are fundamental to landscape architecture such as typological continuity and invention, connectivity and accessibility, the relationship between space and social practices, and environmental comfort in the context of climate change. The studio will explore iterative design across scopes and scales, from the physiological body to the metropolitan fabric of the city.

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

Market Analysis and Urban Economics

This course focuses on the built environment and land-use policy.  The course combines readings from the real estate economics academic literature with conversations with active commercial real estate professionals to offer GSD students an opportunity to learn how to measure, evaluate and understand real estate market forces—trends and cycles.   These factors shape and determine urban planning and urban form, and determine the success or failure of an architect’s, or designer’s, or urban planner’s vision or project.  Both the space and capital markets for real estate are studied.

The course addresses two questions: 

  1. How do urban land and real estate markets function in the global macro-economy? and,
  2. How should a designer/developer/planner/investor evaluate these markets both with regard to the macro and the micro aspects of a specific project?

The course assumes no economic course prerequisite knowledge and is presented in a lecture format.  Evaluation is based on an in-class mid-term, a take home final exam, and a course project/paper.

Upon completion of the course, students will be able to:

Affordable and Mixed-Income Housing Development, Finance, and Management

Explores issues relating to the development, financing, and management of housing affordable to low and moderate income households. Examines community-based development corporations, public housing authorities, housing finance agencies, private developers, and financial intermediaries. Identifies, defines, and analyzes development cost, financing, operating, rental assistance, tax credit, entitlement, and project-generated cross income subsidy vehicles. Assesses alternative debt and equity funding sources for both rental and for-sale mixed-income housing and addresses the now common practice of aggregating multiple subsidies into a single financial package. Reviews other aspects of the affordable housing development process, including assembling and managing the development team, preparing feasibility studies, controlling sites, gaining community support, securing subsidies, establishing design objectives, coordinating the design and construction process, selecting residents or homeowners, providing supportive services, and managing the completed asset. Historically, almost all students in this course have participated in the Affordable Housing Development Competition (AHDC) sponsored by the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston and others. As part of this competition, teams of multidisciplinary graduate students primarily from Harvard and MIT prepare detailed affordable housing proposals working with real sponsors on real sites in the Greater Boston area. These AHDC proposals serve as the final project for this course. The course includes lectures, cases, exercises, site visits, guest lectures, and student presentations. No prior real estate development or finance experience is expected or required.

Also offered by Harvard Kennedy School as SUP-666

 

Jointly Offered Course: HKS SUP-666

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 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

Designers often operate with either formal or social-impact imperatives, when, in reality, all design has a social impact. It is our responsibility to acknowledge this fact and to decide what kind of impact we are going to have. This research and design seminar acknowledges the role that race and class have played (and will continue to play) in the design and production of urban infrastructure, engaging the problematic either-social-impact-or-design binary in two fundamental ways: (1) Interrogating urban design’s contribution to, and complicity with, structural and infrastructural racism; and, (2) Developing intentionally anti-racist design research methodologies that expose issues of equity, access, social justice, and precarity, relating race to the production of space at the scales of culture, geography, and infrastructure.

The seminar will require reading, writing, discussion, and the creation of graphic materials. It is organized into three sections, with the expectation that each student sustain focus on a single US city for all three parts:

Urban Transportation Planning and Implementation

This course examines the policy, politics, planning, and implementation of transportation systems in urban areas. We will explore a broad range of topics that touch on the urban planning framework (geography, demand, and supply); transportation/land use connections; tools and standards (basic traffic engineering and demand modeling concepts); policies (congestion pricing, sustainability, transportation finance, parking); process (project implementation and evaluation), including the evolving landscape of shared mobility, connected vehicles, and new transportation technologies.

Special focus will be given to the Boston context and “culture” of primary agencies and constituencies, examining land use and density, housing affordability, economic growth and connectivity, equity and environmental sustainability.  The course content will focus on detecting, analyzing and considering both persistence and change in primary factors over time and pattern breaks.  Our goal is to elicit class discussion, to spark your own thinking, and have you challenge the assumptions behind “conventional wisdom” in transportation planning.

The format of the course will include weekly readings, lectures, and two-three-hour walking tours (scheduled outside of the weekly meeting) — one featuring highlights of Boston’s transportation history and the other focused on the transportation issues that will be pertinent to assignments. Students are expected to come to class having read the required readings, submit to the class website a one-paragraph (no more than 150 word) response to the readings each week, and to participate actively in class discussions. Students will complete five assignments during the course, two of which will be assigned to groups of three or more.  A detailed assignment sheet will be posted for each assignment along with recommended resources.  Student evaluations will be based on participation (reading responses, discussions, and presentations) and written assignments.