Elements of Urban Design

“Elements of Urban Design” is the advanced core studio for the post-professional Urban Design program. The studio introduces critical concepts, strategies, and technical skills associated with current thinking about urban design, and speculates on the designer’s spectrum of roles in analyzing and shaping urban environments. More generally, the studio aims to develop the necessary literacies for architects and landscape architects to critically engage in bridging the practice of urban design—to understand and interrogate questions related to urban environments, and to produce compelling formal responses. 

A fundamental difference between urban design and architecture and planning is its concern for the “thingness” (Heidegger) of urban settlement, which transcends the single building or complex and involves competing claims and other unreconciled constraints needing to be resolved through design. Today, cities are often parts of larger networks of communities and ecologies within regions, with both overlapping and complementary roles. Urban growth and change now range over a wider landscape, offering both opportunities and constraints, and often with faster growing areas located in peri-urban and peripheral locations. This is certainly the case in several North American cities like Boston, Detroit, and Los Angeles, European cities like Rome and Paris, and a host of settlements across the globe. Even within the thrall of global pressures, local characteristics and identities require both attention and resolution. Globally, the expansion and transformation of metropolitan regions have introduced different scales and types of urban form. Increased economic, social, and environmental complexities further complicate urban design circumstances, making them more challenging. The studio will expose students to this range of conditions and propel them to think systemically about how to intervene in these varied emergent urban formations. 

In the fall semester of 2019, the “Elements of Urban Design” studio is organized around two six-week design exercises located at the core and periphery of the Greater Boston region, which together cover a range of pertinent issues in urban design today, particularly, although not solely, in a North American context. These are preceded by shorter introductory exercises focused on establishing familiarity with workflows and knowledge of case studies.

Landscape Architecture III: Third Semester Core Studio

From Episode to Adaptation: Design for a Littoral Landscape

This studio explores climate change, adaptation, and risk as fundamental to the design of the built environment. Utilizing the Boston Harbor as a case study, the studio will investigate the broad spectrum of possibilities in conceptualizing the interface between water, climate patterns, land, and urbanization processes. Further, Boston Harbor exemplifies risk, as understood through a history of renegotiations between land and water. For instance, the transition from marsh to upland represents a semicontinuous condition that functions on a horizontal spectrum that is continuously intercepted by impervious development. Marshes have been repeatedly filled or drained in the Boston estuary, leaving terrestrial ecology inert. Yet forces such as longshore current, outflow, prevailing wind, and overwash are agents of littoral transformation that offer a form of disturbance critical to a changing coastline.  

In the current context of increased urbanization, unprecedented species mixing, explosive population statistics, and an unpredictable climate, this studio attends to risk as a fundamental feature of the physical environment. The studio is therefore framed by a commitment to materialism. Thus conceived, this studio argues that the task of landscape architecture necessarily contributes to escalating risk by emphasizing research that highlights the connection between social contexts and their grounded, tangible contexts. Students will pursue this commitment both analytically and synthetically: analytically, they will explore how policy, and its associated paperwork, is ultimately grounded in physical interventions in the landscape. Synthetically, they will propose strategies using the core materials of our discipline: water dynamics, living organisms, and the slow pace of geologic formation as expressed in land form and soils. Students will explore the frictions that emerge between abstract and grounded proposals, fixed and dynamic settlement, biotic and abiotic processes, entrenched and mobile territory. We will concern ourselves equally with the built and the living environment, as well as their interrelationships and differences. We will study littoral risk as the most imminent threat to coastal cities in order to reveal what scales make design legible, meaningful, and desirable—and for whom. Together, we will reflect on how changes in both the human and nonhuman environment produce and are produced by risk, and we will frame this larger discourse through the lens of design theory and practice. 

Prerequisites: Enrollment in MLA Program.

First Semester Core Urban Planning Studio

The first semester core studio of the Master in Urban Planning program introduces students to the fundamental knowledge and technical skills used by urban planners to create research, analyze, and implement plans and projects for the built environment. The studio operates in conjunction with VIS 2129, “Spatial Analysis and Representation,” which introduces students to the theoretical underpinnings and spatial analysis of representational techniques to speculate upon and communicate urban planning concepts. 

The studio will use the City of Boston as the students’ planning laboratory and students will be expected to understand the city through the lenses of planning elements such as demographics, economic attributes, market forces, character and built form, and public and private stakeholder interests, all of which shape the city and inform decisions about land use, development, and infrastructure. 

The studio is organized into four parts, representing fundamental stages of the urban planning process. 

Exercise 1. Ideas for Planning: Reading Influential Urban Plans:

This exercise considers a set of “classic” and influential urban plans as a way to engage and critique the fundamental ideas that inform contemporary planning. 

Exercise 2. Observe, Collect, Compile, Listen, and Convey:

Using Boston neighborhoods, this exercise introduces research skills used by urban planners to understand and analyze the built environment: reporting investigations for public audiences and generating graphic and written materials. 

Exercise 3. Make Plans:

Based on skills learned in the previous exercises, students conduct research to better understand planning issues in the Roxbury neighborhood. Students will analyze existing housing, economic, transportation and land use policies, and initiatives in the City of Boston that impact the Dudley Square neighborhood. Students will create an individual plan. Students will be exposed to lectures and workshops that support the effort. This section will provide the students with an opportunity to consider different aspects of a plan in more detail. 

Exercise 4. Communication + Representation:

In this final exercise, students will present their findings regarding the Dudley Square neighborhood based on knowledge obtained during the semester’s work. 

Third Semester Architecture Core: INTEGRATE

Integration is the agenda for the third-semester architecture design studio. Architecture is fundamentally a part-to-whole problem, involving the complex integration of building components, systems, and processes into a synthetic whole. Structural systems, envelope design, and environmental and thermodynamic processes will be systematically addressed in the development of a single project during the course of the whole semester. 

The building type consists of a multiprogram urban building, requiring careful consideration of access and exchanges (circulatory, visual, and energy), between programs. During that time students will work in consultation with engineers and scientists. Design exercises will be addressed through team and individual study. 

Prerequisites: GSD 1101 and GSD 1102, or advanced standing in the MArch I program. 

Landscape Architecture I: First Semester Core Studio

This studio course problematizes issues of orientation and experience, scale and pattern, topographic form, climatic and vegetative influences, and varied ecological processes that help define urban public space. As the first of a four-term sequence of design studios, the course helps students develop spatial literacy and proficiency in diverse modes of inquiry in landscape architecture. The beginning studio exercises investigate a set of typological models rooted in historical and contemporary urban landscape precedents. These undergo sequential transformations aimed at devising hybrid solutions to common conceptual design problems: conditions of stasis and movement, material composition and expression, conditions of solidity and porosity, and change over time. Later in the semester, these studies advance to greater specificity on an urban waterfront site in Boston. A one-week workshop during the semester focuses on specialized analogue techniques of surface description. Students also participate in workshops built around focused interventions through the school’s Sensory Media Platform. Throughout the course, emphasis is placed on the design studio as a performative venue for conceiving, interrogating, and elaborating concrete ideas about the role of the biophysical landscape in shaping urbanization and urban life.

First Semester Architecture Core: PROJECT

PROJECT is the first core studio of the four-semester sequence of the MArch I program. With a multiplicity of references, PROJECT may refer to fundamental modes of architectural representation, the mapping of the subject in the larger objective context, or a conceptual foray into territory unknown. 

A series of focused and intense design exercises requires students to investigate fundamental disciplinary issues of architectural thought, practice, and representation. As the introductory studio in the first professional degree program, the curriculum addresses the varied educational backgrounds of incoming MArch I candidates. Specifically, students are encouraged to leverage their varied expertise in the sciences, humanities, and other disciplines to find provocative and perhaps unexpected motivations of architectural form. Techniques of representation and iterative development across various mediums will be required. 

Prerequisites: Enrollment in MArch I program.

The Spatial Politics of Land: A Comparative Perspective

This course focuses on the deeply contested and political nature of land-use planning. Some would argue that land-use planning is the bread and butter of what planners do. But the act of allocating different, often competing, uses across urban space is undergirded by normative values, making it rife with trade-offs and conflicts. A central premise of this course is to link land-use planning to property rights. How is land, a spatially fixed resource with unique characteristics in each location, transformed into an asset for private ownership, an instrument of finance, a fungible asset? How are fluid ecologies like wetlands and coastal frontiers made into fixed property, and with what social and ecological consequences? How can planners regulate the resources appurtenant to land: who owns (and normatively, who should own) development or air rights above a plot of land, and subsoil resources like groundwater and minerals?

We will add two layers to deepen our understanding of land use and property. The first is the spatial lens. In this current era of post-1970s globalization, we are confronting new and accentuated forms of exclusion from land in the form of gentrification, land grabs, foreclosures, and financialization. In this sense, land-use planning is becoming increasingly transnational as accelerated networks of capital flow unevenly across space. At the same time, the growing strength of transnational social movements and resistance politics is rendering previously standard land-use planning tools, such as eminent domain, virtually unusable. Bringing in the spatial, we will ask how a spatial lens can both deepen our understanding of how land use mediates the production of unjust built environments while also exploring new planning possibilities for the remaking of more socio-spatially just cities and regions. The second is the comparative lens. By foregrounding context, we will interrogate how the same land-use instrument is deployed in varied institutional contexts. How, for instance, do the planning histories and cultures in the United States, China, and South Africa lead to the same instrument of eminent domain being mobilized differently in each context to produce varied outcomes? Each session will have cases and puzzles to ground discussions in real-life settings. 

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.

Economic Development Planning

This course will look at the theory and practice of economic development at the local and regional level, mostly in the context of cities and regions in the United States. It will consider policies, strategies, and programs for dealing with the decline and revitalization of neighborhoods, communities, cities, towns, and regions. The course will focus on forces that create change in communities and the tools and best practices that are available to address these forces. The course will focus on both theory and case studies, and will explore strategies and solutions in an interdisciplinary fashion. 

Economic development typically involves the strategic use of public funds and programs to enable private investment to succeed. At its best, economic development creates a triple bottom-line solution, benefiting business, the community, and the environment. 

The course seeks to understand, through case studies, the economic and political challenges to developing an economic development strategy, and the application of technical skills and planning knowledge to ensure that economic development strategies are successful. 

The course is broken into three segments: 

1. Economic development theory: Understanding the theoretical basis for regional, local, and neighborhood economic development. 

2. Economic development toolkit: Programs and best practices from across the country, including strategies used by local governments and nonprofit organizations as well as tools available at state and federal levels. 

3. Case studies in economic development: Strategies to bring together programs in the economic development toolkit to solve problems and improve communities at different scales. 

The course will include individual analytical work on the case studies as well as a team client project where students will work to address a complex economic development challenge in a local community. 

Housing and Urbanization in the United States

This course examines housing as both an individual concern and an object of policy and planning. It is intended to provide those with an interest in urban policy and planning with a broad background on why housing matters and how its unique attributes give rise to certain challenges and shape how practitioners respond to them.

The course first lays out a framework for understanding the roles housing plays in individuals’ lives, neighborhoods, and the metropolis. Early sessions examine the unique attributes and roles of housing, including the role of homes as constitutive of the private and domestic realms, housing as an icon and encoder of social status, housing as a commodity, and housing as a driver of urbanization and shaper of neighborhoods.

The next sessions focus on housing as an object of policy, examining the early rise of public intervention into housing as a result of concerns over slums and the expansion in the 20th century of programs and policies that shaped housing markets, homeownership, and metropolitan form. We also explore problems flowing directly out of these interventions, including sprawl, concentrated poverty, housing unaffordability, and racial segregation.

Finally, the course focuses on planning and policy responses to these challenges, including responses to poverty and segregation through urban renewal, public housing, fair housing laws, and participatory planning; cost-income mismatches and attempts to supply affordable housing; and land use regulation as a potential solution to the social and environmental problems of low-density, exclusionary development. The final session will touch on some of the most recent solutions to housing challenges including micro units, form-based zoning, age-friendly design, and others.

Upon completion, students will have a firm grasp of housing and urban issues, a theoretical frame for understanding them, and a working knowledge of the planning and policy tools used to address these issues.

 

Jointly Offered Course: HKS SUP-661