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 are being priced out of their rents; do owners chose to “cash out” and sell their properties; and/or do people of color choose to leave the neighborhood because the longstanding cultural character and amenities are eroding. Is displacement inevitable, is it voluntary or involuntary; and if so, is it economic or cultural?
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!
But what about the upside of new investment in historically disinvestment neighborhoods? The addition of new, and often better quality amenities, should be a benefit to all residents, incoming and existing. Long-time homeowners who have not seen increases in the value of their homes should now see increases in their long-term household wealth. And areas of the city that have been steeped in income and racial divide can become places of mixed income and mixed-race, enabling a more productive social and economic ecosystem of community life. Does this type of investment always have to be seen as disruptive?
This course will explore the debate about the causes and effects of gentrification, and attempt to document the real and perceived impacts of such change on the physical, economic, social and cultural dynamics of community. The course will use national and city-specific research on gentrification; neighborhood change measurement methodologies; examine the neighborhood change using data research, literature and media articles and guest lectures. Students will prepare 1) an opinion-editorial essay, offering a definition of gentrification; 2) participate in a team debate arguing either the positive or negative impacts of gentrification; 3) assign indicators and metrics for measuring the presence of gentrification and 4) prepare a case study presentation on effective strategies for addressing either the negative impacts and advancing positive impacts of gentrification.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
Upon completion of the course, students will be able to:
– Analyze the causes, characteristics, consequences, actors and tenure of gentrification
– Develop a working definition of gentrification, indicators for measuring neighborhood change, and the ability to ascertain whether gentrification is occurring
– Identify the positive and negative impacts of gentrification on multiple stakeholders
– Document examples that mitigate negative impacts or advance positive impacts of gentrification
COURSE HOURS
5 weeks of Asynchronous (1.0 hour/class) and Synchronous learning (1.5 hours/class)
3 weeks of Synchronous student debates and presentations (3 hours/class)
4 weeks of Synchronous guest speaker presentations and discussion groups (2 hours/class)
The course Zoom site will remain open for an additional hour within the class time for student informal discussion groups and team collaboration as needed.
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
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 01/19-01/21. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website. If you need assistance, please contact Estefanía Ibáñez.
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 discussion 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 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 underlying urban conditions and characteristics of architectural projects. Within each category, two contemporary examples will provide the primary focus, while precedents and other contemporaneous projects will be introduced to flesh out historial lineages and paths of development. These categories will include: 1) urban block shapers, 2) housing and landscapes, 3) superblock configurations, 4) tall towers, 5) big buildings, 6) infrastructural engagements, 7) infill and puntal interventions, 8) housing special populations, 9) temporary and incremental housing, and 10) mat buildings.
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 that of modern and pre-modern housing in prior eras. Student participation will be by way of attendance, discussion, and especially the detailed analysis and presentation of case study projects.
In Spring 2021, the course will each week consist of three parts: 1) a pre-recorded lecture to be viewed asynchronously (60 min), 2) a live presentation of two case study projects by a pair of students (60 min), followed by 3) a live class discussion focused on the weekly theme (60 min). Beyond weekly participation and contribution to in-class discussions, the main deliverable of the course is the documentation, analysis, and presentation of two case study projects. Students will be paired and assigned the cases at the beginning of the semester. The pair of students will meet with the instructor and TA for office-hour one and two weeks before the presentation date. Short readings and/or videos may also be assigned to facilitate weekly discussions.
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 01/19-01/21. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website. If you need assistance, please contact Estefanía Ibáñez.
Cities and the Urban Informal Economy: Rethinking Development, Urban Design and Planning
Since the emergence of the concept of the ‘urban informal economy’ in the early 1970s, there have been multiple interpretations as well as applications of this concept for urban development in newly industrializing nations. And yet, many important questions still remain to be addressed. The persistence and, in fact, the continuing growth of the urban informal economy around the world has, on the one hand, revealed the complex livelihood patterns of the working poor; but on the other hand, this trend has also brought to fore many new challenges for designers, urban planners, and social activists who care about good and sustainable city form, equitable and efficient city planning, and bottom-up strategies for good governance. What requires close scrutiny are: regulations, policies, taxation, spatial planning, design principles , and institutions through which development strategies affect the lives of the working poor in the urban informal economy. Conversely, the structure and function of cities’ informal economies has profound impact on the spatial, economic, and political development of cites. Yet, the conventional concepts and techniques of Urban Design and Planning seldom directly address the challenges and contributions of the informal economy as a key driving force which influences quality of urban life. In fact, traditional approaches continue to assume the urban informal economy as a transitory outcome which would wither away as cites and nations modernize spatially, economically, socially, and politically.
This interdisciplinary course, led by an urban designer, an urban planner, and a leading global advocate for the urban working poor, intends to scrutinize the different theories and their applications, since the early 1970s, to better understand and influence the informal economy. The objective is to transcend conventional disciplinary approaches with innovative, multidisciplinary thinking regarding how to valorize and enhance the contribution of the urban working poor to good city form, equitable city planning, and democratic urban governance.
This course will introduce the students to both theoretical frameworks and empirical findings to better understand the structure and functions of the urban informal economy, and then assess the effectiveness of past interventions by designers, planners, and social activists to enhance the quality of life of the working poor in the urban informal economy. The ultimate goal is to assist students to transcend conventional thinking with innovative possibilities for more a more humane, sustainable, and convivial cites where the working poor are valued as assets, not a problem. Towards that goal, the course is organized in three modules by three senior faculty across three Institutions (HKS, DUSP-MIT, and GSD). The instructors will be present together synchronously for the start of the class and then at the end of each module where they will discuss the issues presented ion that module. They will also be all present for other synchronous sessions, which are relevant for their collective interactions but at least for 5 sessions -the end of each module as well as the start and summary class.
Course structure: Each module consists of asynchronous lectures and synchronous class discussions. Pre-recorded lectures, reading, and other materials will be made available through Canvas for students to work on their own time. The class will meet on Thursdays from 10 to 11.30 am for live discussions with the instructor of the module; students are expected to attend this session. The synchronous session will be a combination of lectures , workshops, and discussion (collective as well as in break out rooms). This will vary in each module. Each week an instructor will lead the synchronous meeting. More details will be shared on the syllabus.
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 01/19-01/21. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website. If you need assistance, please contact Estefanía Ibáñez.
For mor information on the course logistics please visit: https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/resources/harvard-mit-courselogistics/
CoDesign Field Lab Black Belt Study for the Green New Deal
Biden’s historic win in Georgia, along with the disproportionate impacts of COVID and heightening vulnerability to climate change, bring into clear relief the critical and catalytic location of the US Black Belt region. As anti-racist planners and designers, how might we work within our own communities to align our creative purposes and practices with these powerful movements and changes based in the region? How to begin shifting our cultures, methods, and pedagogies away from white supremacy and intersecting oppressions of race, ethnicity, citizenship, class, gender, sexuality, and ableism to those based on reparation and care—social and ecological? How to use our identity, skills, and power as planners and designers; accomplice local change leaders; and confront exploitative and extractive regimes of spatial development?
Sis·tered, sis·ter·ing, sis·ters (v). Architecture. To affix a beam or other structural member to (another) as a supplementary support.
The Spring 2021 CoDesign Field Lab will “sister” with the Destination Design School of Agricultural Estates (DDSAE), led by the notable design activist, artist, and community developer Euneika Rogers-Sipp (Loeb ’16). "DDSAE is a full-service art, and community design school planned for the Black Belt region of Georgia at 10 partner site locations. DDSAE will celebrate and reimagine the profound culture and history of food, farming and hospitality through the creation of a Black Belt Reparations Design Residency and education center that can serve as a replicable model with a national ripple effect.”
The CoDesign Field Lab research seminar will gather, analyze, synthesize, visualize, and narrate data—to make a case for the Black Belt region to continue its historical and continued trajectory of transformative formation as fount and staging grounds for the Green New Deal. Course objective include (1) mapping opportunities and assets in the Black Belt region that make it a critical and catalytic location for the Green New Deal—particularly related to food + fiber production, waste + energy systems, water + climate resilience, and mobility + access (including access to basic amenities, recreational spaces, and broadband); (2) consider regional stakeholders, decision makers, and resource holders along with power dynamics in affecting Green New Deal planning and implementation; and (3) explore multi-scalar, multi-sector mechanisms for reparative planning and design, which seek to compensate for and heal past harms as well as radically repair forward in ways that serve the combined interests of climate activists, blue-collar workers, and frontline communities.
Course structure: the course will meet synchronously on Wednesday from 10 to 11:30 am EST. Additionally there will be 1.5 hours per week of asynchronous content.
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.
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 01/19-01/21. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website. If you need assistance, please contact Estefanía Ibáñez.
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, as is evident in recent promises about fixing the nation’s infrastructure, infrastructural work can often, in practice, seem to be as much about reinforcing the status quo as 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 antihegemonic infrastructure and imagining its implementation.
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.
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 01/19-01/21. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website. If you need assistance, please contact Estefanía Ibáñez.
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 transforming economic, political, social, and spatial structures and processes to become more inclusive, vibrant, and sustainable.
This course offers an interdisciplinary, critical, reflective, and experimental approach to community development that proceeds in three key parts. The first, “revisiting,” examines the history of community development in the US, including evolving patterns, drivers, and explanations of urban inequality and poverty and corresponding urban policy and planning responses. We also revisit alternative histories of community development, drawing on the intellectual and movement traditions of Black liberation and radical feminist struggles that have sought to change race relations in America in connection with global assaults on capitalism, empire, and patriarchy. We additionally study indigenous community development theory and practice. The second part, “unraveling,” applies these anti-racist, liberatory, and reparative frameworks to critically analyze community development concepts and strategies, interrogating dominant approaches that uphold race, class, and gender-based supremacies. Here we pay 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.
The final part, “praxis,” comprises a speaker series and discussion sessions focused on applied practices and cases— intended to help students develop their own community development agendas and skills within a peer-learning community. Notwithstanding significant advancements in affordable housing development, social service delivery, and placemaking— the traditional mainstay of community development— the course focuses on community development approaches that transcend such neighborhood-scale programming to instead leverage public infrastructure investments and procurement capacities of anchor institutions and apply economic democracy principles to strengthen collective ownership and governance capacity over productive infrastructures and resources. Guest speakers will also include creative community developers incorporating art, culture, and restorative justice practices.
Course evaluations will be based on two assignments (CD atlas entry and final project) and class participation. It has no prerequisites and is open to graduate students across different disciplines.