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

 

Jointly Offered Course: HKS SUP-666

Note: Shopping Day Schedule for SES-5490/SUP-666 at HKS: Thursday, January 23rd from 1:15-2:30 pm in Littauer 230. There will be 2 sessions: 1:15 -1:45 pm and 2:00-2:30 pm.

Public health in an era of epidemics: from the camp to the building

We shouldn’t conceive anymore architecture projects and urban planning interventions that disregard their impact on public health. The way we design buildings, neighborhoods, and cities impact the health outcomes of the population. Urban development is at the core of new epidemics and pandemics, and the growth of urban settlements (including refugees) will likely increase the health gap between people of different socioeconomic status.

We will review existing studies and empirical evidence at the nexus of these fields, and through a scale approach (BUILDING-NEIGHBORHOOD-CITY-GLOBAL), we will study and evaluate different interventions, aiming to dismiss myths and reinforce those initiatives that can potentially improve population health. 

The goal of the course is to build awareness of the importance of incorporating robust public health facts and considerations in the early stages of an architectural or urban design project, but also to equip students with the skills needed to:
• Identify health issues that can potentially be tackled through design interventions
• Use robust evidence (through epidemiological studies) to propose and defend health-oriented solutions in design projects 
• Examine, asses, and design interventions taking into consideration a wide variety of aspects of public health
• Develop health-related interventions in complex public health settings (epidemics, refugees, etc.)

Course format: Interactive and dynamic classes with invited public health experts and presentations by the instructor (topic introduction), students (topic discussion), and a semester-long team exercise.

Developing for Social Impact

How can real estate development advance social purpose while accounting for development feasibility?   

With increasing urgency, those involved in shaping the built world are converging in their desire to harness real estate development for positive social impact.  Community development corporations and other mission-focused non-profits are increasingly entrepreneurial, as the philanthropists and public agencies that support them expect them to be.  Governments increasingly leverage surplus land and deploy development exactions and incentives to shape private investment to serve social policy goals.
 
To fulfill rising expectations to be responsible civic actors, real estate developers have become de facto city-builders, seeking ways to achieve social impact, from housing affordability and climate resilience to food security and job preparedness that goes beyond their project boundaries. Yet there is no established method to reconcile social impact with financial feasibility. 

To address this vexing gap, the course will serve as a social impact development workshop, with two interwoven strands. Through research assignments and class discussion in corporate social responsibility, social impact investing, risk management, enterprise philanthropy and equitable planning, we will work to devise a model for incorporating social impact into market-oriented real estate development. 

We will also apply this model to active Boston development sites. With its strong development climate, sophisticated development community and high public aspirations for development, Boston is an excellent—and easily visited—social impact development laboratory. Real estate developers will visit the class to present projects that seek to align financial and social returns, and will be available outside of class to guide student explorations. 

For their term project, student teams will set financial and social return objectives for a Boston development site of their choosing and propose a method for harmonizing them.  For their mid-term and final reviews, they will make an investment pitch for their case study site to a panel of social impact investors. 

Artificial Intelligence in Contemporary Design Practice

Unprecedented issues, such as climate change, challenge the standard hyper-specialized approach to problem-solving. Within this context, there is a need for professions able to creatively bring together skills from various disciplines and imagine solutions to tackle such crises.

According to the Italian semiotician Umberto Eco, architects are “the last humanists” because they are trained in comprehensive, interdisciplinary, problem-solving methodologies. This applies broadly to other design disciplines, such as landscape architects, who occupy a unique place in society, enabling them to undertake leadership positions in the future, both within and outside of traditional design practice boundaries. In order for this to happen, design tools must support and enhance the design workflow. This seminar will look at one such tool, Artificial Intelligence (AI), from the point of view of the practitioner, or in software development jargon, the user.

As a research field, Artificial Intelligence originated after World War II to convert machine learning for ballistic and aircraft trajectory prediction into civil use technologies. Traditionally pursued as an academic theoretical effort, AI is now gaining widespread attention due to the enhanced computational capability of commercial computers, and the emergence of pervasive sensing supported by Internet of Things devices and high-speed Internet connections. AI, in its various forms, is becoming increasingly more embedded in the design practice through digital design tools.
This innovative technology is fascinating and stimulating. However, the application of AI to the “humanistic” design process poses epistemological questions that are at the core of this seminar. Understanding, even if at a non-specialist level, the functioning of such tools is key to enabling creative and innovative applications.

During the first module “Foundations” students will become familiar with the concepts of complex systems, ecology, mediality, network analysis, and AI, through a series of curated readings and interdisciplinary guest lectures in the fields of mathematics and philosophy. During the second module “Applications and Interfaces” the students will explore innovative applications of AI and their interfaces through a series of interdisciplinary guest lectures in the fields of computational creativity and generative design. 

During the semester, each student will develop a personal research project agreed upon with the instructor. The research will be presented in the context of these two modules and formatted as an academic article for final submission.

There are no prerequisites and the seminar is open to all GSD and MIT students. 

TAISHAN: Designing the Rural Cosmopolis in China

Cosmopolitanism and its vibrancy are commonly associated with urban life; rural life by contrast is often seen as static, disconnected and monocultural. China’s rapid urbanization over the past two decades has led to a decline of its countryside, outward migration, an increasingly poor standard of living and a vanishing rural community. However, an emerging population of returning rural emigrants who have experienced and lived cosmopolitanism in their host cities have been transformed through the everyday negotiations of cultural differences. Taishan, in the Pearl River Delta region, experienced China’s earliest emigration in the 19th century and today retains a distinct diaspora community sustained by the clanship network. As a result, the culture is rooted in ancestral history coexisting with transnational mobility and openness to difference.

This studio will explore tourism as a catalyst for rural revitalization in Taishan. The aim is to support existing social capital while stimulating new development through stakeholder collaboration and local empowerment. The project demands strategies to incentivize returning migrants and small to medium scale entrepreneurs to settle in rural areas that provide an alternative lifestyle for economic and social mobility. Within rural revitalization, thematic tensions are considered: heritage and development. The challenge in defining what is heritage in an urbanizing rural context and how heritage is inherited and integrated into future developments will be of central importance.
 
Students will work in interdisciplinary teams focused on two tasks: 1) at the macro scale – a territorial design for Duanfen Town; 2) a built-form intervention for Tingjiang Village. Within these scales, strategies will be developed in parallel with tangible outcomes. The studio addresses revitalization issues examining the macro to the micro, tangible and intangible, in a dialogue that informs the whole process. Taishan’s cultural background and socio-economic restructuring creates an opportunity to recuperate the social capital between the ancestral clanships and local governance in facilitating the regeneration of the region. The complexity of issues requires concepts born out of the intersection of planning, architecture and landscape architecture. 

The overarching goal of the studio is to facilitate Taishan’s transition from traditional agrarian to a new rural economy, from traditional farmers to cosmopolitan ‘rural’ residents along with the spatial transition from villages to contemporary rural settlements. The studio poses the following:

• How can new development transform the local residents from passive beneficiaries to active stakeholders? 
• What urban qualities can be introduced without threatening the positive rural qualities?
• How can the existing clanship network be maintained in the context of a transforming marketing system? 
• How can new agricultural enterprises be sustainably integrated economically with Taishan’s rural community? 
• What can new development learn from the existing villages at the urban and architectural scales?

The studio is in collaboration with local universities, organizations and government agencies. The outcome of the studio will culminate into a set of design strategies and policy recommendations for action and implementation presented to the People’s Government of Duanfen Town.

Note: This studio will meet on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Elaine Kwong will be in residence for all classes. David Rubin will be in residence on February 4, 5, 18, 19; March 10, 11, 24, 25; April 7, 8, 21, 22; and the final review on either May 1, 4, or 5. Kathryn Firth will be in residence on January 28, 29; February 11, 12, 18, 19; March 10, 11, 24, 25, 31; April 1, 14, 15, 21, 22; and the final review on either May 1, 4, or 5. This studio will travel to Taishan, China. 

Palladio and Raphael: An Innovative Learning Experience

Two leading scholars of the architecture of Andrea Palladio, Guido Beltramini and Howard Burns of the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio, Vicenza, will offer workshops exploring Raphael (1483-1520) and Andrea Palladio (1508-1580), two of the most influential architects of the Renaissance, and the relation between them. Though they had different backgrounds – Palladio trained as a stone carver, whereas Raphael was the son of the court painter in Urbino – they are similar in their view of history, their concern with architectural drawing and representation and commitment to the study and imitation of ancient Roman architecture. Raphael must have been a major source of inspiration for Palladio, who in Rome made a survey plan of his masterpiece, the villa Madama. He also adopted elements of Raphael’s architectural language. He would have noted Raphael’s skill in creating personalized palaces for high functionaries in Pope Leo X’s inner circle.

 The fall session Faking Palladio will introduce students to Palladio’s world, requiring them to produce a fake Palladio drawing. This requires in-depth knowledge of both the material character of the work to be imitated and also the cultural background of the architect imitated. Students will not be invited to produce an exact copy of an existing drawing but to invent a drawing that has never existed. This sort of exercise is made possible because Palladio developed an architecture that he conceived as a language, based on standard elements (such as rooms, stairs, doors, and columns) with proportions governing the relations between the various components. Palladio's treatise, The Four Books on Architecture (Venice, 1570), is essentially a manual with instructions referring to his architecture. Among Palladio’s drawings we find drawings for unbuilt buildings: many of them are plans without the corresponding elevations. To make a fake Palladio drawing, a good starting point is a Palladio original plan from which to imagine a possible development. The students will be asked first to design the elevation, or part of it, then to make a fake, focusing on the materiality of the drawing as an object (the paper, ink, stylus drawn lines, etc.) and on Palladio’s drawing conventions, which are close to those used today.

This spring session Anticipating Palladio will be dedicated to Raphael, always considered as one of the greatest painters. However, he was also a brilliant and innovative (and still little-known) architect, whose approach anticipates Palladio’s. The spring session will consist of lectures, workshops, and seminars on the buildings to be visited during the trip. Topics to be covered include Raphael’s architectural formation (in Urbino, Perugia, Florence and Rome), his writings and ideas, drawings, painted architecture, buildings and design methods, as well as his social world of friends, collaborators, patrons, and rivals, including Michelangelo. Students will explore the complex relation in Raphael between study of ancient Roman architecture and the design of modern buildings, and his revival of Roman constructional techniques and modes of interior decoration. Unbuilt, unfinished or destroyed works by him will be reconstructed in drawings and models. Raphael will also be approached as a “proto- film director”, creator of marvelous single-shot still “movies.” The seminar will offer an exceptional educational and architectural experience and will have a specific goal and outcome: generating ideas and prototypes for virtual and physical models for the exhibition IN THE MIND OF RAPHAEL, Raphael as Architect and inventor of architecture, to be held at the Palladio Centre in Vicenza (Oct. 2020 – Jan. 2021).

Factory of the Sensible and the Political* (Equipping Experience)

Architects have long experimented with altering perceptions of space and structures in order to reconfigure experience. 

At stake in this course are pivotal historical and theoretical transformations in our understanding of perception and experience that are relevant to our contemporary architectural interest in these concepts. 

Behind these transformations lie different instantiations of humanism, proximate or remote technologies (equipment), explosive or suppressed uses of ornamentation, lineages of the sublime, conceptions of the visual, reformations of nature and body, object ontologies, the invention of the life sciences (sensory systems), cybernetics and non-linear dynamical systems theory.  Socio-political agency, in these contexts, are often new tables of operation embedded in aesthetic provocations. 

Walter Benjamin wrote in 1935 that modes of perception change when upheavals happen in the history of human life.  Fredric Jameson, on the other hand, argued in 1991 that the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, designed and built by John Portman, was a “mutation in built space” that is “unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent mutation in the subject.”

Students will read seminal texts and we will collectively discuss evocative architectural projects.  A presentation and two short papers will be required. No prerequisites.

Theories for Practice in Conflict, Crisis, and Recovery

Course topics and objectives:

How do we understand the relationship between crisis, recovery and the built environment at the beginning of the 21st century? Conflicts and disasters are both symptoms and evidence of asymmetrical urban, territorial, and social development. For this reason, any ethically defensible response to a catastrophic event should go beyond “mere” reconstruction and imagine new, more resilient, and more equitable forms of urbanization. This research seminar will therefore examine situations of ‘post-disaster recovery’, as an opportunity to rethink, conceptually redefine, and proactively reconstruct or reconfigure new forms of urbanization.

To begin, we explore the social construction of crisis, disasters and emergencies through a critical interpretive lens, as well as situate contemporary discourses on disaster response within theories of modernization, crisis, and the ‘natural’. We identify the conditions under which certain crises or related challenges are considered normal or routine, as opposed to exceptional. We move beyond the abstract to ground our inquiry in the physical world. We examine the variety of actors involved in recovery interventions – including international institutions, NGOs, citizens, professional planners, political parties – and critically reflect on the role of technology and infrastructure, and various other methodologies deployed to achieve post-disaster aims.

Course format and methods of evaluation:

This course is a reading, writing, and research seminar. It requires sustained participation throughout the semester. Readings span multiple disciplines in the social sciences: urban studies, geography, sociology, political philosophy, and science and technology studies (STS). Some assignments are collective, others individual. Several guests will present themes ranging from the history of disaster, to post-conflict reconciliation, and new technologies of crisis response. Students will use a variety of methodologies such as analytical mapping and design techniques as well as archival, survey, planning, ecological, engineering, and critical conservation practices to offer projective ideas and grounded proposals for novel reconstruction practices that aim for a more vibrant, sustainable, and equitable urbanism.

Conservation, Destruction, and Curating Impermanence

“History is what hurts.”

-Fredric Jameson.

This course deals with the political dimension of architectural, urban, and landscape conservation and aims to develop counter-hegemonic design practices for creating more inclusive definitions of history and spaces. The course questions the foundations upon which traditional conservation is grounded: the parameters of permanence, origin, and authenticity, through readings on the politics of history, memory, and the contribution of the arts. Simultaneously, the course will consist of the deep and critical analysis of late modern and contemporary case studies around the world in which architects and planners take an explicit stance towards sociopolitical circumstances of places by using design means.

Each session will consist of a presentation of selected case studies followed by the discussion of theoretical readings. The selection of projects include, among others, the multilayered history of destruction that David Chipperfield Architects pursue in their intervention of World War Two’s Neues Museum’s ruins in Berlin, Germany; Amateur Architecture Studio’s (founded by Lu Wengyu and Wang Shu) denunciation of government-driven systematic demolitions of rural villages in China by reusing their material rubble in the design of Ningbo’s History Museum; and Lina Bo’s criticism of elitist culture through the commemoration of labor and oppressed populations in her subversive reconversion of an obsolete factory in São Paulo, Brazil. This selection aims to reflect the late modern and contemporary global character of architectural production, but also an approach to the past that advocates for cross-cultural and transhistorical connections that includes the present and is projective towards the future. Despite major differences, I argue that these architects show an awareness of the ideological and political dimensions of architectural conservation and, respectively, articulate committed positions responding to the particular circumstances of place. This consciousness and explicit political positioning through aesthetic practices of resistance is unprecedented in the history of architectural conservation and defines the core of Critical Conservation.

For the analysis and reinterpretation of these projects, we will borrow from the fields of historical and political theory including Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson, Antonio Gramsci, and Chantal Mouffe’s critiques of hegemony and of the role of intellectuals, but also from phenomenological theories such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edward S. Casey, and Dylan Trigg’s critiques of a notion of experience that was reduced to the sensorial dimension and disconnected from intellectual and political discourses. The selected projects resonate with these social theories while using architecture as a medium to express and articulate a counter-hegemonic ideological position.

Environmental Histories, Archived Landscapes

This course examines environmental histories of the 20th century—the alignments and contradictions of environmentalism and new technical environments—through the engineered landscapes of urbanization. Through case studies, the course will critically investigate the documentation of constructed terrestrial, hydrological, and botanical worlds created principally for human habitation. We will focus on gathering and evaluating visual material of drawings, photographs, and print media as evidence of material and cultural change, with critical interest in the undeclared, fleeting, and sometimes unwelcome presence of living systems and ecologies in official accounts of technical lands. The case studies presented will focus on built infrastructure and design projects in North American cities and regions, but students are invited to bring their own subjects for independent research. 

Through this work, we will collectively develop design research methods and methodologies for constructing site through broader nature/culture relations at multiple spatial and temporal scales. This will occur through the development of an argument through the presentation of visual material, production of analytical drawings, and discussion of these materials in class. Students will make use of archives and special collections across the University for primary source research, mobilizing techniques from material culture studies, historical ecology, and visual sociology with guest lectures by ecologists, art historians, and archivists. The course will consist of lectures, 2-3 field trips to local archival resources, and the development of a research project over the course of the semester. All disciplines are welcome.