Travel Behavior and Forecasting
All planning is based on planners’ beliefs about the future. In many cases, the most important (and most uncertain) aspects of the future relate to the behavior of the people for whom we are planning. For transportation planners, the effectiveness of our plans depend on how individuals and households will change their travel habits in response to them. How can we predict these kinds of changes, and what is the purpose of such predictions? Throughout the course, we will grapple with the question of whether a planner’s role is to accommodate future behavior or to influence it.
In this course, you will learn how characteristics of the built environment (including housing density, jobs-housing balance, and the availability of transportation infrastructure) and demographic and life-cycle characteristics (including gender, race, income, and family formation) influence decisions of individuals and households about where and when to travel and by which transportation mode. You will also conduct your own analysis of these relationships for a specific region and apply what you learn to forecasting the demand for transportation infrastructure for a variety of possible futures.
Prerequisite GSD 5215 or equvalent knowlege of quantitative analysis.
Making Participation Relevant to Design
By trying to understand how participation can make design more relevant to society, we can create more socially just cities. This course starts from the premise that it would not be ethical to design cities without creating meaningful conversations with different stakeholders. Our main challenge is to improve the quality and ethics of design work by staying in close contact with the city and its residents.
Participation is a way of confronting our preconceptions, revealing our blind spots, and/or supporting our intuitions in a context where architecture, urbanism, and other design-related fields are becoming more and more complex and multilayered. Participation is not an end, it is a means: a powerful tool that establishes new connections and boosts both creativity and the production of new ideas. Likewise, participation allows the construction of a collective dialogue that will engage people in different ways, formats, and temporalities. Participation is a method to enable the creation of more democratic, inclusive, and open-ended environments, redefining the very concept of citizenship.
– How can designers reimagine participatory decision-making processes?
– How should design participation unfold in an ever-changing reality?
– What improves communication and enhances creative dialogue?
– Can participatory design lead to open-ended processes or outcomes?
Among other strategies deployed to answer these questions, the class will focus on the potential contribution of digital technologies as a means for linking participation to design. Technology opens new opportunities for revealing multiple layers of meaning. It also allows the exchange of information and creation of new possibilities that together can transform the way we behave. Technology, in short, enables us to better relate and interact with each other and our surroundings, thus lowering the barriers for citizen engagement.
Throughout the semester, we will look for alternative means and untapped opportunities to identify and develop socially and technologically innovative approaches, methodologies, and tools. Students will be asked to combine technical skills and knowledge production with a social sensibility to access the direct experience of reality while also producing forms of empowerment that come from involving the relevant actors in transformative processes.
Prerequisites: None.
Up to five seats will be held for MDes students.
Urban Design and the Color-Line
We cannot talk about physical infrastructures in the United States without also talking about race. In this seminar/workshop, students will examine the role that race and class have played (and will continue to play) in the design and production of physical projects. It provides tools for: (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.
Reflecting on NYC 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 North America. Network partners at various stages of development lend their technical assistance and advice to one another about how to advance racial equity in their respective communities. Student research and recommendations will support these efforts ranging from ensuring social inclusion, managing gentrification to avoid displacement, institutionalizing public programming, and negotiating city revenues for project development.
This limited enrollment project-based seminar provides graduate students with a framework for unpacking the making and remaking of physical infrastructures with a deeper understanding of the relationship between systemic racism and the production of space. This course requires weekly readings, writing, discussion, and engagement with a US based civil society organization, as well as the creation of graphic materials for a single infrastructure reuse project. There is no requisite background to take this course.
Experimental Infrastructures
Infrastructure is an encompassing term that can refer to anything from railroad ties to social media to ecosystems, and one which has been enjoying a renaissance in planning and public discourse. We are inundated by rhetoric about green infrastructure, social infrastructure, global infrastructure, and so on. Yet, infrastructural work in practice often seems to be as much about reinforcing the status quo than about building new connections or enabling new ways of living.
This seminar will explore infrastructures as cultural objects and culminate in the design of “experimental infrastructures” that can interject new narratives into society through the built environment. The class will start with a survey of critical infrastructure studies, an interdisciplinary approach that questions how infrastructure has been designed, built, and maintained in ways that reinforce (often problematic) social structures. “Infrastructure” is a term with a specific history, though it has come to encompass a wide range of networks, systems, and tools, and we will use this critical infrastructure approach to map out the political life of the term and its subsequent expansion. After building a theoretical framework around the argument that “infrastructure is social structure” as our foundational premise, we will then attempt to reimagine infrastructure as a tool for radical social change. What, for example, might an explicitly feminist infrastructure look like? A queer infrastructure? A decolonizing infrastructure? An infrastructure of degrowth? To engage in this rethinking, it will be necessary to confront the complicity of infrastructure within historical projects of global economic growth, nationalism, urbanization, natural resource extraction, and other world-ordering projects positioned as necessary public goods, but which have in practice led to gross injustices and inequalities around the world. Class assignments will ask students to consider infrastructural work and infrastructural subjectivity at different scales, from the individual to the global, and will culminate in a final project focused on designing and/or researching a critical counterhegemonic infrastructure and imagining its implementation.
U. S. Housing Markets, Problems, and Policies
This course examines the operation of U.S. housing markets, the principal housing problems facing the nation, and policy approaches to address them within the existing political, regulatory and market contexts. The course is structured around five central areas of concern for housing policy: the challenge of producing housing affordable for lower-income households generally; how best to subsidize rental housing, address homelessness, and provide protection for low- and moderate-income tenants; how to support successful homeownership for low-income households and people of color; the causes, consequences and policy responses to the high degree of residential segregation by race/ethnicity and income; and how housing policy operates at the neighborhood scale to address concerns about revitalization, gentrification, climate change, health and schools.
Each section of the course will develop a detailed understanding of the nature of the problem, how the operation of housing markets either produce or fail to address the problem, introduce the principal federal, state and local policy approaches available to address the problem, and wrestle with critical policy questions that arise in choosing how best to craft a response to the problem.
The goal of the course is to build both a foundation of knowledge and a critical perspective needed to diagnose the genesis of the nation’s housing problems, to identify the potential policy levers for addressing these failures, and to assess the relative merits of alternative approaches. Class sessions will be largely a lecture format but will include ample time for class discussion. Each section of the course will include several guests to provide a range of perspectives on the topics covered, including those from the public and nonprofit sectors, researchers, developers, and the communities served.
Students will be expected to come to classes prepared to be fully engaged participants in the discussions. Over the course of the semester, students will be required to prepare periodic reviews of assigned readings and prepare questions for guests which will be shared on Canvas. The principal assignments for the class will be a mid-term paper analyzing a housing challenge in a jurisdiction of the student’s choosing and a final paper assessing policy options for addressing the challenge and proposing a course of action. The course is intended for graduate students with an interest in US housing policy, although no previous background in housing policy or disciplinary training is required.
This course is jointly listed with HKS as SUP 670.
Advanced Real Estate Development and Finance
This course builds on GSD 5204 and comparable introductory real estate courses offered by other schools at Harvard. It is an essential course for anyone going into real estate development, acquisitions, asset management, or private equity. This year’s course is divided into two major sections.
Section 1 focuses on individual properties or projects and covers five major topics: (1) advanced financial analysis and structuring for land and development, (2) advanced financial analysis and deal structuring for acquisitions (including complex waterfalls), (3) the asset’s capital stack, distress, and “special situations” investments, (4) management and recovery of an asset in a distressed environment, (5) the real estate underwriting process, investment committee package and stochastic return analyses.
Section 2 focuses on the essential concepts and skills required to build performing real estate portfolios and companies. Section 2 covers five additional topics: (6) real estate market cycles and investment considerations, (7) portfolio construction and techniques for optimizing long-term risk adjusted rates of return, (8) REITs and the IPO process, (9) raising equity capital for real estate projects, portfolios, and companies, (10) proptech and cleantech in real estate.
The course will use a combination of case studies, lectures and problem sets to examine a multitude of important advanced real estate topics. Many of the cases require students to apply a full range of real estate skills and learnings to evaluate the appropriate strategic opportunities. We will also host guest lecturers who are renown experts in their respective fields.
The course’s objectives and learning outcomes are to provide students with:
1. in-depth financial analytical skills that are essential for project development and acquisitions, as well as asset and portfolio management,
2. ability to analyze market cycles and manage projects through distressed environments,
3. insight and understanding for how company leaders apply course concepts when building strategic portfolios and successful track records,
4. knowledge of how companies raise capital and what investors specifically underwrite during capital campaigns,
5. knowledge and knowhow of how the proptech investment process works and what constitutes a good proptech opportunity,
6. a deeper comprehension of how to add value to a real estate company’s long-term prosperity and success.
Course Prerequisites: GSD 5204, HBS Real Capital, or a comparable quantitative course in real estate where you gain the working knowledge of real estate economics and learn how to model transactions, waterfalls, and investor returns, as well as how to construct a real estate development pro forma in Excel. This will be the assumed starting point for this course.
Students who took ONE of the two modules, 5275 or 5276, may take this course for two units.
Public and Private Development
Cities are developed by a complex blend of public and private actors and actions. This course employs a combination of lectures, discussions, readings, case studies, and individual and group exercises to help students understand, evaluate, and implement public and private development. The course commences with instruction about core analytic methods, emphasizing real estate financial analysis while also addressing modified cost-benefit, economic impact, and fiscal impact analyses. Early classes also explore legal, institutional, administrative, political, and ethical contextual frameworks. Together, the analytic methods and contextual frameworks allow for elaboration of decision rules about thoughtful balances in the deployment of public and private resources. The remainder of the course covers specific implementation tools including, among others, public subsidies, public land disposition through sale or lease, public land acquisition through eminent domain, value capture mechanisms, community benefits agreements, and business improvement districts. The goal of the course is to foster reflective practitioners, whether planners, designers, developers, public policymakers, or advocates, who think critically and pragmatically as they navigate the trade-offs inherent in public-private city building. Note that most of the implementation tools and examples explored in the course are drawn from United States practice, but international tools and examples are introduced from time to time to demonstrate the range of variation.
Jointly Offered Course: HKS SUP-668
Nano, Micro, Macro: BioFabrication
Rapid global climate change has lent new urgency to our longstanding interest of growing materials to break the unstainable reality of material extraction, use and landfill. Today’s new buildings can be designed and built to operate without using fossil fuels, without emitting CO2 into the atmosphere, but their construction threatens to remain a growing source of carbon emissions. Can biological materials provide the answer? This seminar will explore biologically derived material systems ranging from plants and plant fibers to fungi, bacteria and other microorganisms. Our focus will be on buildings and consumer products, with consideration of the larger landscape and geographical scale. Through in-class lectures, case studies, and hands-on workshops, students will be exposed to some of the new biomaterials that are being developed at the intersection of material science, biology, and design. Other lectures will trace the impact of these material systems on the climate, explore the landscapes of production and their ecologies. The seminar will explore the embodied impacts of our material world and take a critical look at the production of bio-based materials and their geochemical flows. Students will explore various ways of fabricating prototypes with these biomaterials, seeking to understand how new regimes of real-time sensing may be overlaid onto these methods to gain new insights into the material. Students will be required to develop a term project of their choosing in teams relating to issues raised in the course at any scale – be it new material development, new fabrication processes, the design of a circular material economy, or an investigation into landscapes of production. Students from all GSD departments as well as from across the University are encouraged to enroll.
Data Science for Performance-Driven Design
The modeling of energy-efficient buildings and sustainable urban development is an increasing concern in both the building design and sustainability consulting industries. Early adoption of building performance simulation software for decision-making during the design phase is essential to achieving sustainable design goals. Guiding designers to pursue sustainability in their built environments will bring favorable outcomes and low-cost adaptations. Machine learning (ML), Deep Learning (DL) and data science are promising approaches to shaping the design process and offer instantaneous performance feedback. The active use of data science techniques increases the efficiency and accuracy of building simulation workflow and the optimization of building geometry.
This class will leverage data science and performance simulation as the primary drivers in determining design decisions. In the last decade, the fundamentals of building performance simulation tools for energy, daylighting, airflow, and renewable energies have been translated into performance simulation tools and metrics with relevant measures. There are great advantages for students learning to use such tools, including the ability to calculate metrics and to apply related methodologies in their building designs. However, such utilization requires a high level of understanding of the computations necessary for the geometric modeling process, as well as relevant programming skills. These programming skills and analysis techniques will be explained in this class with practical hands-on workshops to impart environmental information and predict building performance in response to design changes. This course will also introduce data management skills, ML-based surrogate modeling, data analysis and visualization for advanced research. The final deliverables will be an optimized building design option/ design space utilizing data science techniques on the design decision making process.
Procedural Fields: Functional Design of Discrete Hyperdimensional Spaces
This course will introduce participants to computational methods for the generation of discrete multi-dimensional media, using functional definitions.
Digital modeling techniques are at the core of most modern creative workflows in visual media, such as static 2D images, video animations, 3D models and digital fabrication. For instance, most prevailing paradigms in CAD modeling are based on the explicit definition of geometrical entities in model space (location and size of 2D shapes, vertices of a mesh, control points of NURBS objects) and their manipulation through constructive modeling operators (extrude, revolve, sweep or boolean operations, to name a few). However useful, such paradigms are often very limited for advanced creation/manipulation of digital models, such as those with high degrees of formal complexity (failed boolean intersections, complex infill patterns in 3D prints) or simply incapable of representing certain kinds of realities (models with non-binary gradients between inside and outside).
In parallel, the field of computer graphics has developed a plethora of techniques designed to generate, visualize and process images displayed on a 2D screen. Many of these methods involve the implicit definition of the rules governing visualization pipelines, expressed as functional representations of the characteristic values in a field of discrete entities. Traditionally, this has translated into the problem of computing the RGB values of each pixel in a digital screen. However, modern applications of these techniques have been extended in multiple dimensions to, for example, generate procedural animated graphics, analyze and process video, perform computational fluid dynamics, voxel-based world generation for video games, or multi-material 3D printing.
In this course, you will learn techniques for the procedural generation of discrete multidimensional spaces, such as 2D images, video, voxelized fields or any extension thereof. We will cover topics such as color theory, image processing, functional modeling, shaders and raytracing techniques. The content of the class will be predominantly technical, and taught through a combination of high-level lectures and hands-on technical workshops. Students are expected to complement the class learning with online materials guided by the instructor. Demonstrated experience in computer programming, such as SCI-6338, CS50 or similar, is a pre-requisite for this class. Student work will consist of guided tutorials and course assignments, culminating with a personal final project of the student's choice.
This course is the second installment of a three-part course series on Computational Design preceded by SCI-6338: Introduction to Computational Design (Fall), and continued by SCI-6365: Enactive Design, Creative Applications Through Concurrent Human-Machine Interaction (Fall) taught by the same instructor.