Market Analysis and Urban Economics
This is a master’s level course intended to introduce students to urban economics and real estate market analysis. It covers urban market fundamentals and how they shape cities and neighborhoods. Key themes include: the economic role of cities, typologies of urban growth and form, bid-rent curves, household and firm location choices, the role of local government, housing, and the dynamics of local property markets. This course introduces students to the concepts, models, and methods used to analyze how economic forces impact (re)development processes, values, and locational patterns in real estate markets.
The course is structured as lectures and workshops, with synchronous and asynchronous components each week. Most weeks the structure will be one day of synchronous lecture and discussion, with a second day of modules (lectures, practice problems, reading responses, and engagement) that may be completed asynchronously.
Readings draw from classic, recent, and current works in urban economics, planning, and academic real estate literatures. Assignments reinforce urban economics concepts and the ability to analyze local property market fundamentals, identify new markets, and measure investment opportunities. Guest lectures by active real estate professionals will offer students the opportunity to learn from practitioners currently operating in the marketplace. Evaluation is based on weekly assignments, a midterm, and a final project/paper.
The course assumes no previous economic knowledge or training.
Art, Design and the Public Domain Proseminar
“What do I want history to do to me?,” asks Zadie Smith. “I might want history to reduce my historical antagonist—and increase me. I might ask it to urgently remind me why I’m moving forward, away from history. Or speak to me always of our intimate relation, of the ties that bind—and indelibly link—my history and me.” As monuments across the world are fell in response to the legacies (and ongoing practices) of colonialism, racism, imperialism, and oppressions nameless, what should rise in their stead? What should we remember? Who should we remember? How should we remember? What do we want history to do to us?
Art, Design, and the Public Domain Proseminar will investigate, generally, our role as artists and designers in the struggle for liberation and, specifically, the status of the monument today. Together we will consider the work of scholars, historians, sociologists, philosophers, psychologists, critics, and intellectuals who themselves have engaged with these questions. We will encounter ideas on freedom, trauma, justice, oppression, community, democracy, otherness, and memory from aesthetic, critical, critical race, poststructuralist, political, psychoanalytic, and queer and feminist theory. We will examine how artists and designers have given these ideas form. And by semester’s end, we will test these ideas in projects of our own.
Public Projection: Projection as a Tool for Expression and Communication in Public Space
The class will focus on the development of original projection projects that can inspire and facilitate artistic expression and cultural communication in public space.
In their projects students may consider (but not be limited to) experimenting with two kinds of projections:
1. Projections-installations that transform and assign new meaning to specific architectural and sculptural urban sites;
2. Wearable, portable, or mobile projections that engage bodily performance in public places.
Students will learn cultural, technical, and ergonomical aspects of such projects.
The projects may require relevant cultural research and invite a creative use of software, hardware, and physical modeling. Students will be encouraged to experiment with video projectors and micro-projectors in connection with media devices, such as smart phones, speakers, monitors, sensors, and other input and output components, as well as the use of unconventional materials and sites as projection “screens.”
The class meetings will include experimentations, development and realization of site-specific and performative projections in public space, presentations, and discussions on relevant artistic and media work, as well as visits to research groups and labs at Harvard, the MIT Media Lab, and in the Boston area.
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 08/31, and/or 09/01. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
Landscape Representation I
The rich and varied discipline of landscape architecture is inextricably intertwined with the concept of representation. The first in a three-semester sequence, this course introduces students to the unique relationship between landscape architecture and representation through an overview of its history, techniques, and conventions. Emphasizing experimentation and fabrication, this course embraces representation as a highly generative process in the act of designing.
Weekly tutorials, presentations, and discussions reinforce a collaborative space to investigate new skills, strategies, and workflows. Through a series of exercises, students will develop their own iterative representational approach that incorporates both analog and digital methodologies. Coursework will include digital software such as AutoCAD, Rhino, and Adobe Creative Suite (Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign), as well as physical modeling and hand drawing techniques.
Prerequisites: None.
Spatial Analysis and the Built Environment
Urban planners engage in many complex processes that defy easy representation. This course provides first-semester urban planning students with the graphic and technical skills needed to reason, design, and communicate these processes with geospatial data. This knowledge will be embedded within a larger critical framework that addresses the cultural history of categorization, data collection, and cartography as tools of persuasion for organizing space.
Visual expression is one of the most compelling methods to describe the physical environment, and students will learn techniques specifically geared toward clarifying social, political, and economic dynamics and how they relate the structuring of spaces. The class will introduce fundamentals of data collecting, data formatting, and data importing into a Geographic Information System (GIS) environment.
Students will gain familiarity with the technical tools essential to GIS for making maps and exploring relationships in the physical, regulatory, and demographic dimensions of the landscape. Within GIS, students will learn the basics of geospatial processing to produce new forms of knowledge in support of ideas about urban planning and design. Desktop publishing tools, including Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign will be used to distil ideas into effective graphic presentations. The class will also advance techniques for representing form and space through diagramming and three-dimensional modeling programs.
Students will be introduced to workflows that demonstrate how to move effectively between data from these platforms and modes of representation. Class lectures will be complemented with technical workshops.
Objectives:
1. Establish a conceptual framework for critically engaging the practices of mapping and data visualization.
2. Provide a basic understanding of tools and techniques needed to reason, design, and communicate with geospatial data.
3. Develop students’ skill and confidence for visualizing the complex processes, flows, and dependencies unique to the planning discipline.
Course format: This course will meet via Zoom on Monday and Wednesday mornings. Wednesday meetings will typically begin with a 30-minute discussion of the day's reading assignment, followed by a 30-minute in-class exercise, which will often be a drawing exercise that can be done away from a computer. Wednesday sessions will conclude with a 30-minute discussion of key lessons and take-aways from that in-class exercise. An independent assignment will be assigned each Wednesday and due the following Monday. In Monday class sessions, students will present their work and receive feedback from their classmates and the instructor. Friday software tutorials will be also be offered on Friday mornings from 9am to noon. Attendance at these sessions is optional, and they will be recorded for students to view on-demand if they are unable to attend synchronously.
Prerequisites: Enrollment in the Urban Planning program.
Architectural Representation II
Architectural Representation II: Projective Disciplines
This course examines systems of projection as constructs that mediate between our spatial imagination and built form. Projective systems have defined relationships between masons, engineers, industrial designers, mathematicians, cartographers, painters, and architects. Their historical origins and evolution into digital culture will be studied through the theory and practice of projective and descriptive geometry. Invented as techniques to draw form, these discourses are the bases of the intractable reciprocity between representation as technique (not merely style), and three-dimensional space. The objective of this course is to uncover the centuries-old and still ongoing relationship between representation, form, and construction—more generally, the reciprocity between three-dimensional form and flatness.
Principles of parallel (orthographic), central (perspectival), and other less common forms of projective transformation explain many processes of formal production—vision, subjective experience, drawing, modeling, and building. Beginning with 2D drawing exercises and transitioning to 3D modeling, we will interrogate the effects of the digital interface and mechanics of modeling software on contemporary discourse. As students explore the power and limitations of the flat drawing plane, they will also develop literacy in primitive and complex surface geometries—their combinatory aggregation, subdivision, and discretization—as they relate back to the most reductive of architectural forms—the planar surface. Ultimately, these techniques will be placed into a productive dialogue with architectural and programmatic imperatives. The design tools of the digital and post-digital age have allowed designers to invent and produce form with increasing facility, eliminating the need to understand the consequential and demanding relationships between geometry and architecture. The course will involve close formal reading of buildings as a way to introduce students to the practice of reading, drawing, and writing architecture.
Composed of both lectures and workshops, the course is participatory and is equal parts theoretical and technical. Exercises will involve two-dimensional digital drawing, digital modeling, and basic Grasshopper. Both Tuesday sessions (lectures and discussions) and Thursday sessions (technical workshops) will meet synchronously. Workshops will be recorded live for asynchronous viewing as well, though synchronous attendance is strongly encouraged. This course is required for all first-year MArch I students.
Architectural Representation I
Architectural Representation I: Origins + Originality
Architectural representation is an ideology—a source of ideas and visionary theorizing that has a set of origins and qualities. As such, it’s prudent to study the origins of conventional techniques of architectural representation to be informed about their intentions and the specific contexts that conditioned their development.
Representation is not a conclusive index of an architecture already designed and completed, in the past tense. Rather, representation is integral to the design process and the production of architecture—it is present and future tense: an active participant in exploring and making. It occurs in multiple instances and forms along a project’s evolutionary path. Though not deterministic of the architecture, representation techniques selected to visualize ideas influence the evolution and outcome of the work.
The course initiates with an analysis of conventional representation techniques and their intentions. Using this knowledge as a platform, the class pivots to consider representational riffs emerging in response to the contemporary context—those that explore the limits of our “origin arsenal” and question what each offers for the present. Possible paradigms of architectural spaces generated from representation (rather than the other way around) will be presented and discussed.
“Architectural Representation I: Origins + Originality” will involve readings, lectures, and discussions framing the backstory on conventional techniques as well as contemporary critical stances in relation to these techniques. Students will be required to complete weekly representation exercises in relation to each course topic by experimenting with new representations of their design work being produced in parallel courses. These design exercises will be presented to and discussed by the class.
The final project will involve isolating a representation from concurrent studio work and critically evaluating the architectural possibilities that extend from its close reading and revision. The final project will require articulation of the goals of the original representation technique and the specific aims toward originality in the tweaking of this technique, as suited to the design project.
This Land Is Your Land [M1]
In the US, there are over 300 federal Indian reservations, covering over 50 million acres of land in 36 states. However, a majority of Native Americans—as many as 78 percent—live off reservations in urban areas. Since the passage of the Indian Relocation Act of 1956, which encouraged Native Americans to assimilate into the general population by moving to cities, the population of so-called “urban Indians” has been increasing rapidly. But the assumptions behind the Indian Relocation Act and similarly short-sided, callous, and colonialist “Indian Termination” policies—namely, that assimilation is desirable, and that relocation to metropolitan job centers would reduce the poverty endemic to isolated, rural reservations—were deeply flawed. Due to discrimination, disinvestment, and neglect, Native Americans living in urban areas today face poverty, unemployment, and undereducation rates that are nearly double what they are for the general urban population, and account for a disproportionate percentage of people experiencing homelessness.
In response to these (and many other) inequities, an urban, intertribal, indigenous movement emerged in the late 1960s. In no city was this movement more pronounced than in Minneapolis, where, in 1968, a group of activists founded the legendary American Indian Movement—a group that would become synonymous with calls for economic independence, cultural revitalization, tribal autonomy, and the restoration of lands that they believed had been illegally seized. Today, Minneapolis has one of the largest urban Native American populations in the country, and boasts one of the only Native American Districts in the U.S. Located on the traditional homelands of the Dakota people, the District includes Native-owned homes, businesses, and non-profit organizations, most of which are clustered around the American Indian Cultural Corridor (the only urban Native American corridor in the country).
This studio invites students from all departments to work with Minneapolis’s Native American Community Development Institute (NACDI) to help make this District and Corridor better reflect the needs of the Native American residents who call it home. Drawing from NACDI’s “Community Blueprint,” students will have an opportunity to work on any number of community-defined architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, and urban design projects. These include outdoor public spaces for Native American ceremonies and pow wows, a new Native American urban farm, a new center for indigenous cosmology, strategies for indigenous streetscaping, strategies for affordable housing, and many other projects.
While the immediate goal of the studio is therefore pragmatic, a broader goal is to think about land use in the context of the ongoing struggle for indigenous self-determination. Indeed, how might we help reactivate indigenous ideas about humans' relationship to our natural and built environments? And how can architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, and urban design be tools of reconciliation? Of liberation?
GSD students may view additional information on option studios:
Schedule for Zoom Q&A sessions
As of Right: First Nations Reclaim the City [M2]
Ninety-five percent of British Columbia is “unceded,” meaning it was never given up by indigenous communities in treaties. As a result, today, many First Nations bands maintain title and rights to their land, which they may develop however they please, with little interference from non-indigenous government. Seeing an opportunity to improve living conditions and generate income for their members—some of this land is in valuable, opportunity- and transit-rich urban centers—some First Nations bands are proceeding with ambitious, game-changing development plans.
One such community is the Squamish Nation, one of three Local First Nations in Vancouver. In the words of Squamish Nation Councillor Khelsilem, the Squamish are “becoming powerful in their territory once more:” under an initiative called “The Squamish are Coming Home,” the Nation is looking to build new indigenous communities on their undeveloped reserve land, which includes large, highly-coveted parcels in some of Vancouver's most prosperous areas. This studio invites students from all disciplines to work with members of the Squamish Nation to imagine what might be done with this undeveloped reserve land, and identify how it can best reflect the needs, aspirations, and values of the Squamish people. As the reserve lands are very varied, student projects are anticipated to be diverse, and could range from small-scale urban infill, to large-scale urban redevelopments, to extra-large landscape restoration projects.
While the immediate goal of the studio is therefore pragmatic, a broader goal is to think about land use in the context of recent nods towards truth and reconciliation, as well as the ongoing struggle for indigenous self-determination. Indeed, how might we help reactivate indigenous ideas about humans' relationship to our natural and built environments? And how can architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, and urban design be tools of reconciliation? Of liberation?
GSD students may view additional information on option studios:
Schedule for Zoom Q&A sessions
The Right to the Sewage
The Mezquital Valley is the world’s longest running experiment with wastewater agriculture, having received all of Mexico City’s untreated sewage continuously since 1901. What started as a small stream at the beginning of the 20th century is now a torrent that irrigates and fertilizes 220,000 acres of farmland. While the sewage offers an enormous free subsidy to these farmers in the form of nitrogen and other plant nutrients, it also poses human health risks and long term environmental challenges for the valley’s soil. The recent construction of a billion dollar wastewater treatment plant has sparked fierce resistance from farmers, who claim that their yields have been reduced by half while contaminants like heavy metals remain in the treated water. For these farmers, poverty is also a health risk.
In this studio we will examine the mutual co-construction of Mexico City and the Mezquital Valley in order to propose a way forward. A basic assumption of this studio will be that the world cannot afford for wastewater agriculture to fail, as climate change will make dry-land farming increasingly important for food sustainability in many of the world's largest cities. How do these cities need to change in order to support wastewater agriculture? How does agriculture need to change to better anticipate its metabolic connection to the bodies and urban milieu of 20 million people? In our work we will develop projects that confront material relations on both sides of the sewage pipe.
This studio is supported by the SOM Foundation. Over the course of the semester we will engage scholars and activists from Mexico, and benefit from a collaboration with Mexican students of edaphology at UNAM, the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Spanish language competence is encouraged, but not required. Our work will require us to develop projects to a high level of detail, with an emphasis on drawing. We will also develop our technical competency in adapting architectural drawing for web-ready content. Students will work independently, but we will benefit from a collective attitude towards knowledge production.
GSD students may view additional information on option studios: