First Semester Core Urban Planning Studio

First Semester Core Urban Planning Studio introduces students to the fundamental knowledge and technical skills used by urban planners to research, analyze, create and implement plans and projects for the built environment. The studio operates in conjunction with VIS-2129: Spatial Analysis and the Built Environment, which introduces students to the theoretical underpinnings and spatial analysis of representational techniques to design and communicate urban planning concepts. 

The studio will use the Boston region and its neighborhoods as a planning laboratory and students will be expected to understand the city through the lens of planning elements such as demographics; economic, market, social, cultural, environmental attributes; urban 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. 

We will consider urgent planning issues and dilemmas emanating from the US legacy of white supremacy, which operates through the built environment, political system, economic sectors and labor markets, and cultural institutions. These include disproportionate effects of the pandemic on Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities, mass protests against police killings of Black Americans, and the national movement for police divestment and reinvestment in public infrastructures and amenities, including parks and recreation, community development, and social services. 

We also will examine how anthropogenic climate change is challenging the design disciplines, asking what are the responsibilities of today’s planners in mitigating its effects and promoting justice as it impacts the built environment. This is particularly true in the context of the Greater Boston region, where many communities are expected to experience some degree of sea-level rise by the year 2050. 

Landscape Architecture I: First Semester Core Studio

WHAT IS PUBLIC ABOUT A PUBLIC SPACE?

STU-1111 is the first in a sequence of four core studios that, together, constitute the foundation of your education at the GSD. In the studios, the hands-on experience of design is a synthetic act, bringing together theory, technique, and aesthetic sensibility in the making of a landscape. In this studio, you will apply the skills and knowledge acquired through other first year courses—Histories of Landscape Architecture, Landscape Representation, and Ecologies, Techniques, Technologies to the conceptualization and design of landscapes. Upon successfully completing this studio you will have laid the foundation on which the rest of your study at the GSD will stand. 

The central topic of this semester’s studio is landscapes in the public realm: how is the public defined? Who defines it? What is a public landscape? How do we recognize it? How is it different from private ones? What and who do they represent, and how are they funded?

These questions will be explored through three themes that build upon one another— material culture, spaces for free assembly, and spaces for equity and health. As a discipline that deals with the transformation and the production of space, landscape architecture is in essence a materialist practice, whose outcome is made out of real, physical things. More specifically to landscape architecture, design entails the transformation of living systems, and require deep knowledge about materials, how they live, reproduce, die, their interactions with time and weather, and their origins and evolution. 

At the same time that you learn to work with living materials, we will put emphasis on how the spatial configurations produced by landscape architecture can have significant consequences that transcend the purely physical: the landscapes we design enable and inhibit different forms of relationships between different entities. In urban contexts, people and their rights as citizens—and as human beings– constitute the central subject and object of those interactions. Within urban landscapes, it is the public space, more specifically, what constitutes the fundamental domain in the provision and protection of democracy, for it is in the public space where the most profound manifestations of social conflict, individual self-expression, and cultural exchange take place.

Thus this studio explores two types of public space commonly found in the American city, the public square—City Hall Plaza in Boston– and the riverfront park–the right bank of the Charles River in Allston– and the physical and political implications in their transformation. Through these two different sites, we will look into public space as representation of our shared conditions of existence, as expression of difference, values, individuality, universality, knowledge, and power, and we will study how the changes we introduce in the received configuration of the public imply, inevitably, the affirmation, the manipulation, and the suppression of some of those conditions. 

While the landscapes we design are nested within larger landscapes and urban systems that are determined by broad and intricate networks of social and economic processes, in this studio we will focus on how the specific forms of discreet sites might constitute in themselves powerful tools in the transformation of those larger processes. Thus, although this studio starts with a rather small site (a courtyard) and ends with a presumably large one (a portion of the Charles River in Allston) we will not be bound by the simple idea that a larger site is necessarily more “difficult” as a design process, or that each is typologically bound to a predetermined historical format. Rather, we will focus on all the scales embedded in any landscape, finding the minute in the large, and the expansive in the small. 

 

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.

Urban Economics for Planners and Policymakers

This course introduces economic frameworks for understanding both the benefits and challenges of living in, working in and managing cities.  Urban economics incorporates the concept of space into canonical economic models and provides a lens for analyzing and describing the nature and organization of economic activity in urban settings.  We will explore questions around why cities exist at all, what determines their growth, and what features contribute to their advantages as well as their unique problems.  Why do some cities grow faster than others?  Can cities ever get too dense or large?  We will draw from typical urban economic models and frameworks, but will also discuss and test their limits when applying them to complex urban systems. For example, how well do these models address issues of segregation and informality in cities?  The course will draw from research and scholarship in the field of urban economics, as well as actual cases, policy applications and guest lecturers employing these concepts in the field.  Students who take this class will be able to use economic frameworks and methods to design, evaluate and implement planning and policy interventions in a range of urban settings.  

Note: the instructor will offer online live course presentations on 08/26, and/or 08/27. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.

Please note this course will meet online through 9/15. After that, the class will meet in person with the exception of a few sessions that will be held via Zoom to accommodate guest speakers and other content delivery. Please review the syllabus and course schedule for more details. Please note that this is subject to change.

Transportation Economics and Finance

We can define transportation infrastructure to comprise all the physical objects that provide mobility: including everything from trains, highways, and ports to sneakers, trails, and scooters. The amount and type of available infrastructure that is available to urban travelers depends very much on who is willing to pay for it and how.

Upon completion of this course, you will be prepared to evaluate alternative methods of funding the construction, purchase, and maintenance of transportation infrastructure in terms of feasibility and fairness. You will also be prepared to use financing and pricing as tools to shape the development of transportation networks and to facilitate sustainable travel.

Note: the instructor will offer online live course presentations on 08/26, and/or 08/27. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.

Please note this course will meet online through 9/15.

The Theory and Practice of Sustainable Urban Development: SDG #11 and Beyond

This project-based course seeks a critical yet constructive approach to the emerging urban agenda formulated within the UN’s 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The inclusion of SDG#11 (“Sustainable Cities and Communities”) is considered ground-breaking for its formal embrace of cities within the international framing of sustainable development goals, by focusing attention not only on how cities can be made sustainable but also how they can become drivers of sustainability more broadly. The larger aim of the class is to develop materials to be displayed in a Virtual Pavilion on sustainable urban development sponsored by the Urban Economic Forum (UEF), in partnership with UN-Habitat and others. In preparation for these deliverables, students will examine sustainable urban development through five dimensions: scale, infrastructure, governance, technological innovation, and ethics. They also will determine whether synergies between these dimensions exist in practice, how and why, and will ask whether opportunities may exist for more robust cross-sectoral approaches to sustainability, emphasizing the range of SDGs beyond #11. In the process, we underscore the necessity of achieving sustainable development with a better appreciation for urban space and with attention to processes and metrics that help cultivate effective, long-term sustainability.

The class begins with an initial historical and theoretical exploration of sustainable urban development and its relationship to other environmental domains and international development over the past three decades. The process through which particular goals were established as part of the UN’s 2030 Agenda and through which indicators were chosen as the means of measuring “success” will be a key area of focus, with a view to how they relate to local practice.  Weekly readings and discussions will provide the foundational elements for students to develop a compendium of sustainable urban development practices as a key deliverable from the class. Comparative case studies will be directed towards understanding differences within and between sustainability in the Global South and North. In addition, students will produce an analytical research essay that develops a critical analysis of sustainable urban development in engagement with the case study research and/or through one or more of the five dimensions explored in class.
 

Note: the instructor will offer online live course presentations on 08/26, and/or 08/27. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.

Please note this course will meet online through 9/15.

Land Policy and Planning for Equitable and Fiscally Healthy Communities

The course highlights the role land policy and land-based financing play in the development of equitable and fiscally healthy communities in developed and developing countries.  The presentation and analysis of global cases, particularly from the Global South, on land value capture, community land trusts, and land readjustment will demonstrate why and how land markets and creative land policy approaches are relevant to planners, urban designers, real estate professionals, and risk managers, especially as they pursue sustainable, equitable urban development goals.  The course identifies the relationship between planning regulations, infrastructure investments, and land value increments and the synergies that can be created at the local level to sustain municipal finances and the investments needed to battle climate change, housing crises, and informality, among other transcendental policy issues.

Note: the instructor will offer online live course presentations on 08/26, and/or 08/27. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.

Please note this course will meet online through 9/15.

Reimagining social infrastructure and collective futures

Design tools and spatial approaches can play a vital role in reimagining a twenty-first century social infrastructure—the underlying structures that sustain social life, including spaces of sociability and care. This course explores how well-designed social infrastructure contributes to sustainable, just, and regenerative collective futures.

The past century’s role of government in fostering public and social infrastructure changed from Roosevelt’s New Deal to Reagan’s neoliberal and free-market economy and its aftermath. The former supported big government and its investments in public infrastructure, and the latter diminished and privatized public and social infrastructure, leaving the burden of care and civic participation to philanthropy, churches, and solidarity structures that operate at the family and household level through various local, national, and international grassroots networks.

How can we reimagine social infrastructure today, beyond the neoliberal era of privatization, fossil-fuel-driven growth, and environmental degradation, to better address societal needs and urgencies such as the climate crisis, migration, isolationism, and unprecedented socioeconomic inequality?

Social infrastructure is equally a product of imagination as it is of pragmatism. One must be able to imagine models of just and regenerative collective futures, but also produce spaces and coordinate actual processes for distributing resources and creating equitable access to social and public services across all scales of human community and ecology. 

This project-based seminar will examine diverse examples of social infrastructures, community-driven spaces, and spatial processes that pool and share resources to build social cohesion in times of crisis at various scales and in various places and contexts. We will build on and spatialize visionary and pragmatic models ranging from Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth, Mission Economy by Mariana Mazzucato, Palaces for the People by Eric Klinenberg, Social Capital: Measurements and Consequences by Robert Putnam, Revolution at Point Zero by Silvia Federici, and a multitude of examples of bottom-up systems of mutual aid, solidarity, and reciprocity.

The primary goal of this course is to explore the built environment from the perspective of social infrastructure by accumulating case studies, sharing methods, developing design tools and interventions to illustrate and enact spaces for just and regenerative social infrastructures and collective futures within Earth’s capacity for reproduction. Showcases and student projects will focus on diverse shared societal resources, commons, public education, the right to assembly, empowerment, leisure, and health-, child-, elderly-, and ecological care.

The sessions will include lectures, guest lectures, discussions, and open workshops.

Please note this course will meet online through 9/15.

Mapping the Political Economy of Space

There is no such thing as neutral space. Topography and soil history, land use and tenure chronicle, housing demands and construction costs, public policies, plot subdivision and zoning, access to water and electricity networks and other public infrastructure, negotiations and financing schemes, urban codes and insurance policies, location and surrounding context, project design and materiality choices, excavation works, execution and construction settings, labor force and machinery, completion and real estate mechanisms, occupancy, use and expansion, decay and destruction: at every turn, several agents and forces act upon space. The production of architecture and urban form is grounded in power structures, and articulating a possible political economy of space uncovers how the house, the neighborhood, the city, and the territory partake in the violent and unjust spatiality of power. This seminar is set on understanding what forces shape the built environment and in what ways by uncovering the social, economic, or political forces that impact and generate the physical and technological features of our world. The aim is to enhance our capacity to reflect on spatial conditions in a critical way, and use representation tools available to designers to do so.

The class is structured around 7 guest lectures articulating “7 Questions” on the political economy of space, prepared with readings, while students chose a topic to investigate mapping the political economy of space. Explorative mappings and graphic representations, along with short texts shall be produced in order to untangle the actors and forces acting upon space, to investigate and uncover the relationship between social, economic, and political processes and spatial form. Ultimately, the aim is to articulate a definition of what a possible political economy of space could entail, and how to use it as a critical thinking tool within design and research practices.

Note: the instructor will offer online live course presentations on 08/26, and/or 08/27. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.

Please note this course will meet online through 9/15. After that, the class will meet in person with the exception of the following dates, when the class will meet on Zoom with guest speakers: 9/8, 9/22, 10/6, 10/20, 11/3, 11/17.  Please review the syllabus for more details. Please note that this is subject to change.

NOTE: the first class meeting is scheduled on September 1 online at 6:00 PM EST – 90

Urban Ethnographies

Planners’ understanding of social process and cultural values is often woefully inadequate, and their thinking is dominated by a “one-size-fits-all” approach and by excessive attention to the values of an international middle class rather than to local experience. In this course, we will read some urban ethnography inspecting the interactions among local people, planners, anthropologists, architects, and builders in order to think against the grain, especially in cases where disputes over whose heritage is at stake dominate the discourse. We will also examine the role of conflict in shaping urban space and ask whether attempts to smooth it over are necessarily to the benefit of local populations, especially where internal factionalism and political dissent are at stake. Finally, we will also examine the role of urban space in shaping people’s subjectivities and ask what that role tells us about governmental structures and the way they affect ordinary people’s lives.

Course enrollment is limited to twelve. Six spots will be prioritized for MDes Critical Conservation students who select the course first in the lottery.

Please note this course will meet online through 9/15. After that, the class will meet in person with the possible exception of one or two sessions to be held on Zoom. More details will be provided at the start of the semester or well in advance of any change.

The first class meeting will be on Wednesday, September 1st. The rest of the semester, classes will meet during the official scheduled time. 

Note: the instructor will offer online live course presentations on 08/26, and/or 08/27. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website