Analytic Methods of Urban Planning: Qualitative

How can planners understand places in a rich, meaningful, and yet systematic way? This module examines how qualitative approaches can be used in planning practice and research. Qualitative methods are particularly useful in answering why and how questions; investigating differing perceptions and values; understanding unique situations; and helping describe complex situations.

Focused on learning-by-doing, the class examines how to design a qualitative research project and reviews a range of data collection and analysis methods useful in community and organizational environments. With the aid of well-thought-out conceptual frameworks, qualitative research can be designed to make a coherent and meaningful argument. Students learn about collecting and reviewing artifacts, observing places, asking questions, engaging with diverse groups, and using visual techniques. Such data are frequently organized into specific kinds of outputs including case studies, scenarios, and evaluations. Students will try out these approaches in weekly exercises.

By the end of the class, students will be able to:

1. Identify the range of qualitative methods commonly used in planning practice globally, including methods planners use themselves and those used in research planners commission and/or read.

2. Use different qualitative data collection and analytical approaches.

3. Comprehend the strengths and limitations of qualitative approaches and how they can be combined with other methods (mixed-method approaches).

4. Understand how qualitative methods can aid more complex and systematic understanding of urban places.

5. Critically assess qualitative research designs and outputs.

6. Design common forms of qualitative studies (e.g., assessing existing conditions, evaluating an intervention, preparing a case study, and developing future scenarios).

7. Appreciate ethical issues in qualitative research and their relationship to planning ethics more generally.   

Analytic Methods of Urban Planning: Quantitative

This course introduces students to quantitative analysis and research methods for urban planning. The course begins with an examination of how quantitative methods fit within the broader analytic landscape. It then exposes students to basic descriptive statistics (including measures of central tendency and dispersion), principles of statistical inference, and a wide variety of analytic methods and their practical application. By the end of the course, students will be comfortable with many analytic techniques relevant to urban planning and policy, including: z-tests, t-tests, ANOVA, chi square tests, correlation, and multivariate regression. On a broader level, students will gain the ability to understand and critically question the kinds of analyses and representations of quantitative data encountered in urban planning and allied disciplines.

The aim of the course is to introduce students to key concepts and tools in quantitative analysis and research. Most importantly, however, the goal is to develop students’ intuition regarding data analysis and the application of statistical techniques. By the end of the course, students will be familiar with how common techniques of quantitative analysis can be applied to a wide variety of data. Students will also gain a sense of the strengths and weaknesses of quantitative data analysis and under what circumstances the tools learned in the class are best applied in practice. The course seeks to train technically competent, intellectually critical practitioners and scholars who are able to apply quantitative methods in a wide range of settings, and who are also aware of the wider analytic context into which these approaches fit. There is a focus throughout the course on epistemology and the ethics of claim-making. Over the course, students will deepen their understanding of how claims are made, how claims are connected to different forms of evidence, and what makes different kinds of claims credible.

Proseminar in Urbanism, Landscape, Ecology

This required seminar introduces candidates in the MDes Urbanism, Landscape, Ecology (ULE) concentration to the range of individual and group research on urbanism, landscape, and ecology presently pursued by GSD faculty. Through weekly readings, presentations, research tutorials, and discussions, incoming MDes ULE students are introduced to the research agendas of several core faculty members working in this area. Each faculty member will present a distinct set of questions and methods with respect to contemporary urbanism, landscape, ecology, geography, cartography, or territory. 

Seminar participants will gain insight into the discourse surrounding a diverse array of disciplinary questions, and into the methodological implications of those questions. They will be invited to identify a particular research problem or question to inform their own research within the context of the various topics, themes, and agendas articulated and discussed in the seminar. Participants will present this question in the form of an abstract, a seminar presentation, and research paper. Upon completion of the seminar, MDes ULE candidates will have articulated a specific research question to pursue in the coming semesters with a faculty advisor. 

Digital Media: Composition

This course proposes a conceptual opposition between “filter” and “fill” to investigate the ways image analysis techniques augment topics in architectural composition. In the context of this course, “filters” consist of processes designed to subtract data from images to render information legible, and “fills” are processes that add data to create content. Unpacking the inner workings of processes—such as segmentation, seam carving, and deconvolution—reveals intellectual and aesthetic dispositions behind popular design practices.

While “filters” and “fills” are similar to existing analytical methods, they are seldom used to think critically about architecture. For example, the palimpsest, instrumental in Peter Eisenman’s work, is similar to the figure-finding “filter” because it also problematizes boundary indeterminacy. The palimpsest is productive for seeing and thinking through formal, historical, and contextual questions because drawing mechanics are widely understood. In other words, knowing how drawings work makes the palimpsest a perceptual and a conceptual device. The “filter,” by contrast, is predominantly an aesthetic device because image mechanics are obscure.

Course format:

This course covers a wide range of methods and theories, and thus is not oriented toward the mastery of any particular tool. Rather, our objective is to swerve from established definitions for form. Over the course of the semester, a set of five terms common to architecture and computer graphics frames the investigation. Readings and short writing assignments draw upon the fields of architecture, philosophy, history of science, and engineering. Exercises experiment with raster imaging tools. The final project is a small publication consisting of speculative drawings and texts.

Evaluation: Students will be evaluated on the depth of critiques, formal and representational invention, and craft.

Prerequisites: None.

Digital Media: Manipulations

This course is an introduction to fundamental concepts, techniques, and methods in digital design with a focus on reciprocal processes of translation between digital media and material artifacts.

The term manipulation can refer to the skillful handling or operation of a thing. It can also connote more deceitful ambitions of obfuscation or alteration. This course seeks to leverage this ambiguity as a site of productive tension. It will investigate how digital processes influence the ways in which we design, produce, and experience form via two primary areas of inquiry—the artifact and the event.

Developments in digital tools have facilitated increasingly intricate processes of formal exploration and material manipulation. Novel computational strategies can integrate a variety of material-specific design considerations into the design process and have enabled new methods for material exploration. However, gaps remain between prevailing design methods and existing paradigms of fabrication and assembly.

Beyond the control afforded in various processes of materialization, digital technologies can also assign new or alternative readings to form. The capacities afforded by projection mapping can serve to enhance, efface, transfigure, or disintegrate form.

Course format:

Offered as weekly three-hour sessions of lectures, discussions, and hands-on workshops, the course will address the content described above through a semester-long project organized into a sequential set of assignments. Exercises will experiment with robotically-controlled fabrication techniques, and the course will integrate empirical studies with digital modeling and simulation techniques. Instructor-led workshops will include tutorials on software including Rhino/Grasshopper and its associated plugins for analysis, simulation, and animation (Millipede, Kangaroo, Squid, etc.) and the projection mapping software MadMapper.

There are no prerequisites for this course, only a willingness for open experimentation and critical evaluation of the presented digital processes and tools. For the final project, participants will leverage the workflows developed in class to digitally fabricate a full-scale artifact and selectively incorporate projection-mapping techniques to invite multiple interpretations of the object.

Prerequisites: None.

Climate Justice

Recent discourse around climate change—including debates about the Anthropocene, Green New Deal legislation, the plight of climate refugees, the dire warnings of the IPCC 1.5°C report, 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 justice. The class will therefore combine study of theories of justice, inequality, and structural violence with a deep dive into 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.  

Action Research for Open Public Realms

"The best way to understand something is to try and change it."
—Kurt Lewin

Action researchers work with partner communities to define problems, generate knowledge, and apply learning in ways that are at once contextual, participatory, and change-oriented. They challenge prevailing divides between theory and action, researcher and subject, science and policy, and process and outcome. Methodologically agnostic, action research can encompass quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods as well as multilateral conversations that search for and try out new ways of thinking and intervention—so long as they are deemed appropriate to the situation problematized by participants. Ranging from reformist to radical in their goals, action research approaches share a commitment to democratizing knowledge, learning, and control over change processes.

In this project-based course, students will critically examine the meanings and possibilities of open public realms with Boston-area, place-based organizations affiliated with the Place Leadership Network (PLN), a joint initiative between the Boston Foundation and the Community Design and Learning Initiative at the Harvard GSD. Including main streets, parks conservancies, business improvement districts, and CDCs, the partner organizations share decades of experience managing and stewarding public spaces in the Boston region while operating at diverse scales, located in different geographies, and representing different constituents. Through joint data gathering and analysis, deliberative dialogue with partner organizations, and reflective praxis of action research, students will explore strategies for promoting inclusive, democratic, and vibrant public spaces in an urban and regional context of racialized, classed, and gendered im/mobility and access.

Mud Works! Hands-on Workshop on Earthen Structures (Summer 2019)

Contemporary innovations in the design and construction of buildings and environments predominantly follow a specific pattern: industrialized and imported materials are utilized to make high-tech products to exist in the midst of the vernacular world. However, many of these processes do not typically incorporate local traditions, microeconomies, or the potentials of nurturing vernacular know-how. The ethos of this workshop is built on the premise that building with natural materials maximizes the potentials of freely available resources and creates employment opportunities for members of a local community. As a result, investments in the built environment generate returns in both environmental and social capital. This is what we call architecture for development. We envision earthen architecture to be a viable alternative. An inherently sustainable material, earthen construction has a long history of sustaining homes and livelihoods in the most dramatic geographical, climatic, and economic conditions. However, the extant proverbial image of “mud hut” continues to challenge a wider perception of building with earth. Our explorations will explore both technical and aesthetic qualities of earthen construction. 

Our challenge is to evoke the archaic experience of human building and to capture a phenomenological diversity from this resource. Additionally, we will explore design and construction from the perspective of applied craftsmanship in both high-tech and low-tech conditions. The aim is to introduce students to the tremendous elastic range of earthen construction methods and familiarize students with material, technical, and participatory processes that this bottom-up form of design and development engenders. Students will collaborate in the design and construction of earthen building details, as well as learn schematic expressions with clay. Lectures and presentations led by Martin, Anna, and invited guests will complement the hands-on design workshop. The course will include one research and design assignment, which will be due upon arrival in Austria. The assignment will require written research as well as drawings or diagrams to document the speculative use of earthen structure in a specific historical building, to be selected from a predetermined list. Students will have the opportunity to revise the assignment, after the workshop, for final submission. 

Evaluation: Based upon participation and teamwork in the workshop as well as the depth of research and originality of the speculative project. 

This workshop took place during the summer of 2019. Enrollment in this course was preselected via lottery. 

Manfredo Tafuri and The Historiography And Criticism of Architecture 1960-1990

The seminar focuses on the markedly complex intellectual biography of Manfredo Tafuri, whose work touched upon many fields of knowledge including theories of art and architecture, linguistics, philosophy, historiography, sociology, and psychology. We will follow the evolution of his ideas within the contexts of both the political and cultural changes in Italy during the five decades of his life, and the architectural and historiographic debates of that period, of which he was a main protagonist. A selection of readings will illuminate the transformation of these ideas and serve as the primary means of investigation.

Rather than consolidating Manfredo Tafuri’s thinking as one main trunk or body of work, the seminar will attempt to understand the dynamic and often contradictory trajectory of this immense intellectual figure—“Dividuus and not in-dividuus,” as he would say. The result should be twofold: to address the necessity of a complex approach to understanding architecture, and to evaluate and perhaps adopt a fruitful set of concepts to approaching contemporary ideas and history.

Course format:

The seminar will begin with lectures on the life and works of Tafuri and on the Italian political, economic, and cultural context. Required readings will be analyzed by all the participants and designated students will present on readings at each meeting. The course will close with a final meeting with guest experts on Tafuri’s ideas.

Evaluation:

Students will be evaluated on their level of active engagement and participation, their required presentation, and a paper on a topic of their choice related to the framework of the seminar.

Prerequisites: None. Some knowledge of Italian is welcome.

One Century of Modernization in Latin America: 1880-1980

This course focuses on how the processes of modernization in Latin America affected the fields of architecture and landscape design as well as urban ideas and projects. It will start with a general geographic and historical introduction and then approach the main traits of pre-Hispanic and colonial manifestations in the aforementioned fields.

Each topic will be illustrated and analyzed through examples from each of the three periods covered in the course: 1880–1920, 1920–1945, and 1945–1980. The first can be characterized as “Modernization without Modernisms,” the second as the “Triumph of Cosmopolitan Modernisms,” and the third as the “Search for Latin American Modernism.”

Many current debates relating to architecture, the landscape, and the city were anticipated in the history of Latin America. Two such examples include the development of modernist expressions without a strong dependence on the ideological constraints shown in Brazil in the 1940s and 1950s, and the reconsideration of low-tech solutions as illustrated in the projects of the 1960s. The main objective of this course is to provide an opportunity for students to access and incorporate this history within their own thinking and practice.

Course format:

The course is taught in a lecture format accompanied by assigned readings. Students will investigate a related topic of their choice and present the research at two times during the term: at midterm (preliminary) and at the end of the semester. Students are also required to write a paper. Evaluation will be based on the treatment of the topic both in terms of the objective of the course and on the strength of the bibliographical research.

Prerequisites: None. Some knowledge of Spanish is welcome.