Land Loss, Reclamation, and Stewardship in Contemporary Native America

This course will explore three critical dimensions in American Indian land issues: historical land loss, contemporary tribal governmental efforts at land reclamation, stewardship, and co-management.  We will begin by tracking the history of land dispossession from colonial settlement to the present day.  We will then move on to explore the reality of contemporary tribal governance and how that critical function turns on jurisdiction over traditional lands.  Are these lands owned outright?  Are they held in trust by the US government for the benefit of the tribal nations?  Are they traditional territories technically outside the control of the tribes, but with day-to-day stewardship and oversight provided by tribes?  Finally, we will conclude the course with a speculative exercise that invites students to imagine future scenarios for land reclamation.

This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.

 

Designer Developer

Design and finance can both be understood as universal languages. Although architects, landscape architects, and planners are trained to produce and interpret design, it is becoming more and more necessary for them also to be conversant and sometimes fluent in finance to implement innovative design proposals. As building complexity and the sophistication of building needs, construction methods, and finance have increased, architects have progressively taken on less risk and abandoned more agency. This seminar will explore the designer-as-developer model: the potential to carve out more agency for designers in construction and development, and how design generates added value in real estate development.

The seminar will begin with lectures on the designer-as-developer model and discuss how the value of design can be quantified in the real estate development industry. The course will cover project and construction management, construction pricing, permitting and approval procedures, and basic financial structures for designer-developer projects. Lectures and tutorials will be given on basic financial modeling as required to complete the final project for the course. The seminar will review these topics through discussions based on real-world case studies. The seminar will incorporate case studies that examine how designer-developer projects were able to further design innovation while maintaining a handle on feasibility. Practitioners who have leveraged their background in design while working in the fields of Real Estate Development, Real Estate Investment, and Community Development will be invited to speak as guest lecturers to share their real-world experience as a designer-developer. Guest lecturers will include Alloy, Catalyst Urban Development, JP Morgan Chase, LA Más, Duval Companies, and Placetailor.

Designers often value design innovation and public impact, while most clients heavily weigh feasibility, schedule, and financial returns. By acting as both the designer and client, students will learn how to understand the values and risks of building in the 21st century. We will focus on a designer’s ability to imagine and bring progressive building ideas to market and discuss effective project and construction management. To reinforce the material discussed in class, students will be tasked with completing two assignments throughout the course. In the Case Study Assignment, students will be asked to identify and research a designer-developer project and present the deal points to the class. For the Group Project Proposal, using knowledge gained throughout the course, students will be expected to put forward a proposal for the designer-development initiated project. The final project may be of any scale or location, but must represent financial viability, have a design agenda, and identify potential risks and proposed mitigations in the process of bringing the project to market.

This seminar is aimed at equipping students with the knowledge and confidence to develop their own mission-aligned projects, whether they are market-rate projects or community benefit developments. Students will be exposed to the myriad considerations and processes that enable a building to be designed, approved, and built. They will learn to align their entrepreneurial aspirations with the pursuit of creating work that benefits a greater public. Design and finance are seldom discussed together due to the perception that they belong to two different phases of development. However, for developers, design is a powerful tool when underwriting a potential project. For designers, acknowledging the financial constraints and understanding precedents for economic opportunity can provide a sustainable foundation for design innovation.

This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.

 

Modern Housing and Urban Districts: Concepts, Cases and Comparisons

This seminar course deals with 'modern housing' covering a period primarily from the 1900s to the present. It engages with 'urban districts' in so far as housing projects under discussion contribute to the making of these districts, and are in turn shaped by the districts in which they are placed. Cases will be drawn from different contexts, with emphasis on Europe, North America, and East Asia, although also including examples from the Americas, South and Southeast Asia, North Africa, the Middle East, and Oceania.

The course begins with discussions of several broad topics germane to the issue and design of contemporary housing, including ideas of community and what constitutes a dwelling community across the span of historical time and cultural perspectives; territories and types dealing with underlying urban conditions that play host to the housing; and interiors and other landscapes that chart the diversity of contemporary living, including expressive and representation issues concerning place-specific and inherently situated aspects of dwelling, alongside the dynamic, perennially future-oriented dimensions of living.

These broad topical discussions will be followed by case studies, roughly categorized by the characteristics of architectural projects and underlying urban conditions. In each category, two contemporary examples will provide the primary focus, while precedents and other contemporaneous projects will be introduced to flesh out historical circumstances and lineages of development. These categories will include: 1) urban block shapers, 2) superblock configurations, 3) tall towers, 4) big buildings, 5) mat buildings, 6) housing and landscapes, 7) infrastructural engagements, 8) infill and puntal interventions, 9) housing special populations, and 10) rapid and incremental housing. The concluding discussion will examine various dimensions across projects and urban conditions, in part to identify opportunities and limitations for housing design, but also to set contemporary housing aside from modern and pre-modern housing in prior eras.

In Spring 2022, the first two classes will be online, with 1) a pre-recorded lecture to be viewed asynchronously, and 2) a live discussion on zoom during class time. From the third week onwards, each class will include 1) a pre-recorded lecture to be viewed asynchronously, 2) an in-class summary of the lecture, 3) student presentation of the case projects, and 4) a discussion focused on the weekly theme and reading. Beyond weekly participation and contribution to in-class discussions, the main deliverable of the course is the research, analysis, and presentation of case study projects. Students will be paired and assigned the cases at the beginning of the semester. The presenting students will meet with the instructor one and two weeks before the presentation date. Short readings may also be assigned to facilitate weekly discussions.

 

Up to five seats will be held for MDes students.

 

This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.

 

 

Urban Design for Planners

This 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 give spatial definition and form to an urban district through the elaboration of streets, blocks, building morphologies, open space networks and/or design guidelines. This course complements the first year Core Urban Planning Studios at the GSD 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 implementation.

Students 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 effectively portray urban redevelopment scenarios.

 

This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.

 

Climate Justice

Recent discourse around climate change—including debates about the Anthropocene, Green New Deal legislation, the dire warnings of the IPCC, to name a few—increasingly make evident that climate change is much more than a technological problem of carbon mitigation. Taking recent geological and climatic changes as symptoms of deeper structural challenges, this class will address climate change as fundamentally a problem of social and environmental injustice. The class will argue for the necessity of studying theories of justice, inequality, and structural violence along with climate science, policy, and international diplomacy. In our search for climate justice, the class will trace various forms of climate activism within the history of environmental movements, explore non-Western forms of knowledge as key critiques and logics of action, and evaluate concrete suggestions for radical reform. We will discuss how climate justice as a framework of concern is both universal and specific, and we will critically engage ideas of justice at different scales, from the local to the global, with careful attention to context. We will ultimately ask what new kinds of practices, knowledges, and collaborations are necessary to build more just and responsible relationships between people and the nonhuman world, and with each other.

 

This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.

 

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.

This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.

 

Developing for Social Impact

This course explores a question with great currency but no methodology: how can real estate development both advance social purpose and account for development feasibility?

During the last 40 years of neoliberal city-making, those shaping the built world have converged in their aim to harness real estate development for positive social impact. Government agencies use surplus land and development exactions and incentives to steer private investment toward public policy goals; foundations, community development corporations and other social sector organizations use market strategies to advance their missions; and real estate developers, eager to prove themselves responsible civic actors, have become social entrepreneurs, seeking to provide social and environmental benefits that ripple beyond their project boundaries.

Yet social impact goals can be elusive—hard to define, measure and achieve—and they only arise if projects are financially feasible. But there is no established method to harmonize social impact with development feasibility. To address this vexing gap, the course will serve as a social impact development workshop, with two interwoven strands:

We will conclude by discussing policy changes that could increase the feasibility of purpose-driven development and will probe how reliance on private investment to produce public goods both advances and impedes positive social and environmental outcomes.

 

Up to six seats will be held for MDes students, with priority given to REBE Area students.

 

This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.

 

 

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.

 

This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.

 

Urban Design and the Color-Line

We cannot talk about physical infrastructure in the United States without also talking about race. This seminar/workshop introduces students to the role that race and class have played – and will continue to play – in the design and implementation of physical infrastructures. 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 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. 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. Throughout the semester, students will work in pairs and collaborate with one of six HLN organizations, helping them develop their own Equitable Impacts Framework (EIF).

This limited enrollment project-based seminar provides 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.

 

Up to three seats will be held for MDes students.

 

This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.

 

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.

 

Up to five seats will be held for MDes students, with priority given to Ecologies Domain and RR Area students.

 

This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.