Design for Real Estate

This course provides a comprehensive understanding of the role of design and design professionals in real estate, from project conception to project delivery to post-occupancy evaluation. The goal is to provide developers and owners with the knowledge and methodological tools arising from design to conceive and execute distinctive, financially successful, socially responsible, and environmentally sustainable projects. The course will include lectures with class discussion, short exercises, field trips to recently completed and in-the-works projects, and several guest speakers.
 
The course begins with an overview of the design standards that shape contemporary building types within asset classes as demanded by building codes, development regulations, underwriting benchmarks, market preferences, and the global standardization of building components and furniture systems. Understanding the rationale for the plan configurations and circulation armatures of specific real estate types helps clarify the role of efficiency metrics as key determinants of building design and the way that space is best configured to create future financial, social, and environmental value. The course also covers the market and regulatory-driven logic of site planning, including the relationship between streets, blocks, and development parcels in urban and suburban contexts.

Beyond exploring the programmatic and spatial interdependency of the components that make up real estate, the course looks at a variety of methods for integrating financial analysis and design considerations especially at when projects are being conceptualized. Students will be asked to explore approaches that balance risk mitigation, typically accomplished by relying on pre-existing models (“comps”), with more innovative approaches that aim to capture market share by defining new needs and audiences and proposing unprecedented but financially viable spatial and aesthetic configurations.

The course explores the interplay between developer as client and designer as professional, with special consideration for how the knowledge and skills of designers can be utilized more effectively by real estate practitioners. This is a required course for students in the Master in Real Estate program, but is open as well to urban design, planning, architecture, and landscape students who are interested in learning about the many ways that various considerations, including efficiency metrics, risk mitigation, and land values, shape contemporary buildings and new urban districts.

Although this is a limited enrollment course, MRE students should enroll directly during the open enrollment period and not enter the Limited Enrollment Course Lottery.

Analytic Methods of Urban Planning: Quantitative [Module 2]

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.

Analytic Methods of Urban Planning: Qualitative [Module 2]

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.

Field Studies in Real Estate, Urban Planning and Design

Field Studies in Real Estate, Urban Planning and Design: Redeveloping the historic AMTRAK Penn Central train station district in Baltimore, MD and the I-195 riverfront corridor in Providence, RI

This course provides students with an understanding of the dynamics and complexities of real world development that create contemporary urban physical environments. The course emphasizes the integration of urban planning, urban design and development aspects of projects that respond to realistic market demand, political, financial, regulatory, and stakeholder constraints. It is designed for urban planners, designers, and real estate students to broaden their understanding of solving complex urban and economic development problems, as well as to improve their skills in master planning, design, financial, and ESG impact analysis.
 
The pedagogical objectives of the course are as following:
 
1. to introduce students to the intrinsic linkage between financial soundness and design creativity required in the process of real estate development
 
2. to introduce students to the framework of capital market mechanisms and the broad range of activities involved in achieving successful real estate development with special attention to the various roles played by professional service providers
 
3. to expose students to as many aspects of real estate issues and decision-making challenges as possible. Students will work in teams of four or five.  The teams may change from the first to second part of the course.
 
4. During the semester, investigations include development feasibility studies (market, physical, environmental, financial, regulatory and political), site planning, master planning, urban design, building design, financing-public/private joint ventures, public and ESG (environmental, social, governance) impact, and other critical factors for creating the best strategic vision for each project.

Cost to students for local travel (Providence, RI) will be meals, incidentals, and ground transportation to Providence, RI. Cost to students for travel to Baltimore, MD will be $150 (term-billed) plus meals and incidentals.

8 seats are included in the GSD Limited Enrollment Course Lottery. Students selected in the Lottery will be prioritized for the Baltimore site. The course will accommodate additional students who will focus on the Providence site.

SCHEDULE NOTE, this course meets on Tuesday, September 5th at 6 PM in Gund 318. Students who are enrolled or waitlisted through the GSD Limited Enrollment Course Lottery must attend or contact the instructor.

The first day of GSD classes, Tuesday, September 5th, is held as a MONDAY schedule. After the evening meeting noted above, the first official class meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 12th. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

Land Use and Environmental Law

As a scarce and necessary resource, land triggers competition and conflict over its possession and use. For privately owned land, the market manages much of the competition through its familiar allocative price-setting framework. However, because one person’s use of land affects individual and collective interests of others and market mechanisms alone do not always protect or promote such interests, laws enacted by legislative bodies, administered by government agencies, and reviewed by courts have arisen to fill the gap.
    
Encompassed in local ordinances, higher-level legislation, administrative rules, discretionary government decisions, constitutions, and judicial opinions, land use laws and environmental laws significantly shape the built and natural environment. For example, zoning’s use and density restrictions affect whether neighborhoods are demographically diverse or homogeneous, its height and setback restrictions sculpt the skyline. Environmental laws govern the extent to which land uses pollute air, water, and land, whether habitat is available for endangered species, and whether wetlands are preserved. Recently enacted laws are beginning to address the impacts of climate change, determining whether and how individuals may build or rebuild in areas vulnerable to floods, severe storms, forest fires, heat waves, and droughts.
    
Through lectures, discussions, readings, and a written exercise, this course provides students with a working knowledge of land use laws and environmental laws, the institutions that create, implement, and review them, and the issues that swirl around them. The course distinguishes law’s method from those employed by other disciplines and fields. The role of non-lawyers, including urban planners, designers, public policymakers, developers, and community activists in influencing, drafting, and implementing land use and environmental laws, is explored.
    
No prior legal background is assumed. Students with a legal background have found the course instructive. For pedagogical reasons, laws employed in the United States will be the main references, but comparisons with laws in other countries will be regularly made. Reading assignments are drawn from primary sources (legislation, constitutions, judicial opinions) and secondary sources (law review and journal articles, book excerpts, professional reports). A written exercise asks students to critically examine one provision of a zoning law and draft its replacement. An oral final exam will test overall fluency with the course subject matter.

The first day of GSD classes, Tuesday, September 5th, is held as a MONDAY schedule. As this course meets on Mondays, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 5th. It will meet regularly thereafter.  

This course is jointly listed with HKS as SUP-663.

 

 

Real Estate Finance, Development, and Management

This course teaches the fundamentals of real estate for all major property types and land uses. The various stages of the development process, including site selection, market analysis, financial feasibility, design considerations, legal requirements, construction oversight, lease-up, operations, and ultimate property disposition, are examined. Acquisition, management, and disposition of existing real estate assets are similarly explored. Teaching cases are designed to place students in decision-making situations commonly faced by real estate professionals. Methods of using discounted cash flow analysis for income property, for-sale property, construction and permanent mortgage loans, joint venture structures, real estate investment trusts, and secondary markets are explored. Optional review sessions focusing on real estate financial analysis will support the course. MRE students are required to take this course but may pursue a waiver of this requirement by successfully passing a waiver examination administered during orientation week. Other students will need to demonstrate a basic literacy in real estate through prior coursework or experience in order to take the class.

Although this is a limited enrollment course, MRE students should enroll directly during the open enrollment period and not enter the Limited Enrollment Course Lottery.

The first day of GSD classes, Tuesday, September 5th, is held as a MONDAY schedule. As this course meets on Mondays, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 5th. It will meet regularly thereafter.  

Buildings and Urban Intelligence

Rapidly increasing urban sprawl is evolving into a scenario where about 70% of the world’s population would be living in urban areas by the year 2050. Increased urbanization coupled with an explosion in availability of high-resolution data has opened new avenues of understanding and operating buildings, both as an entity as well in swarms.

The course would explore the creation of a digital twin for upcoming and/or existing neighborhoods based on the fragmented data streams both from individual buildings as well as larger urban areas to make predictive assessments that will allow technology and policy recommendations in the following domains;

Energy and carbon flows / Community Decarbonization
The relative orientation, design and massing of buildings in a new neighborhood can have a profound effect on the operational energy and hence carbon emissions from catering to the energy needs of the neighborhood. Case studies would include but not limited to building retrofits, transactive exchange of energy between buildings and community demand response.

Optimizations with respect to material selection (low extraction and process energy, lower transport requirements etc.) for new neighborhoods would be performed to have overall low embodied carbon footprint with same or better performance.

Climate change and socially just adaptation
Urbanization exacerbates the impact of higher temperatures that are resulting from climate change. Case studies will explore the architectural and urban design choices that a cohort of buildings at block/neighborhood level can adopt resulting in improved local microclimate and mitigation of heat related hazard in built spaces as well as open urban areas.

For example, finding the most cost-effective solution from the space of cool roofs, weatherization and distributed energy resources to lower the heat exposure in a low-income neighborhood for the heat wave scenario in the year 2050.

Course Objectives:
• Mapping and understanding the dynamics between buildings and their neighborhood.
• Simulating collective responses that a cohort of buildings can take to achieve a common goal.
• Learning to use platforms that connect buildings to their geographical area and to design solutions that help municipalities with their sustainability and decarbonization targets.

Independent learning, initiative, and self-guided energy assessment work are critical in this module. Students spend considerable time on web tutorials, trying out different model concepts and testing the outcomes.

The first day of GSD classes, Tuesday, September 5th, is held as a MONDAY schedule. As this course meets only on Tuesdays, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 12th. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

Power||Energy: Mapping the Thickened Ground of Labor

The definition of energy is dominated by a western logic of energy as a resource. This understanding was focused on the primary objective of putting energy to effective use that was then translated into power objectives and governance schemes for putting the planet to work in service of fossil-fuel empires. Subsequently this defined concepts of labour, society, and the environment through power struggles for vast territories of natural resources, land claims, the growth of economies, and development of urbanised areas.

The now outmoded and failing US electrical network of energy production, distribution, and consumption have shaped the patterns and territorial infrastructure of our urbanized landscapes. This vast infrastructure network describes a complex, dynamic exchange between human beings and the landscape over an extensive period of time. Emerging from these tensions is a thickened ground of multiple heterogeneous parts and networks intertwined with less tangible metabolic and material processes that describe the ‘natures’ of the urbanised landscape through its indeterminable characteristics.

The ubiquitous and relentless exploitation of the earth as a resource for energy production to be plundered and commodified continues to disrupt the deep complex processes of nature leading to major environmental and health ramifications. Consequently racial, social, and economic disparities that are imminently present and inherently linked to the environment are further exacerbated. The climate crisis is symptomatic of this prejudice where the power of a select few humans rises above others and their non-human counterparts, corralled into disciplinary regimes of work valued through distinct economic imperatives.

The seminar reckons with the immediate need to upgrade and expand the US electrical power grid system to meet the demands of growing urban communities and recognizes the obligation to engage with the climate crisis. In it, we envision energy systems that inherently hold a capacity for adaptation and simultaneously serve as the formative catalyst of the urban landscape.

The seminar introduces and explores new value systems for the environment and alternative definitions of power, work, and energy to tackle this complex systemic suite of crises. This project-based seminar is structured around two phases; Phase One: Energy and Power and Phase Two: Energy and Ecology, . The teaching and learning schedule includes a series of guest lectures focused on articulating the relationship between the different positions and definitions of energy and the implications of their territorial and spatial formations.  A range of critical mapping and representation techniques will be explored in order to generate an understanding and future speculations of a thickened ground of energy. The aim is to question who are the actors and agencies involved, what are the forms of governance, their territorial demarcations and land use,  ecosystems, historical events and material flows and processes that determine the shape of the ever evolving form of ground and its planetary effects.

Transformable Design Methods

The aim of Transformable Design is to is to introduce new ways of thinking about design through real-time morphological changes. The course provides a theoretical overview and practical methods for designing objects that can change their size, shape and surface.

Class sessions will generally consist of a lecture followed by discussion and review of project assignments. Several workshops will also be offered on software and hardware techniques. All classes are in-person.

Lecture topics include introduction to mechanisms theory, classification of transformable behaviors (e.g. expansion, morphing, retraction, folding, etc.), design methods to produce behavior types, as well as practical techniques, for construction and automated control. The concepts presented will be reinforced though physical experimentation and software simulations.

This course involves use of CAD software to produce simulations and animations of mechanisms, however, no prerequisite software skills are required and workshops will be offered on Grasshopper/Rhino on these topics:

Course assignments will be staged in two parts. For the first part, students will create a series of mechanism studies – both in physical and virtual form. These assignments will reinforce understanding of lecture topics as well as provide a hands-on familiarity with mechanical interaction. For the second part, students will form groups (2-4 students) to produce a functional project demonstrating physical transformation. Groups may choose the project emphasis according to their particular interests. Projects may range from full-scale operable architectural sections to scale-models that focus on broader architectural context. This project offers the opportunity for creative engagement and original thinking about new possibilities for transformable architecture.

Grades are based on the quality of the research, submitted assignments (inclusive of the final group project), and class participation. There is a final review and participation is required for this session.

Students from all GSD departments and from across the University, as well as MIT students, are encouraged to enroll.

The first day of GSD classes, Tuesday, September 5th, is held as a MONDAY schedule. As this course meets only on Tuesdays, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 12th. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

Working Landscapes: Natural Resiliency And Redesign

Ecological principles and their application to design and planning will be emphasized.  Topics will include understanding human impacts on natural systems through engineering and design, their consequences, and the use of ecological principles and methods of landscape design and planning to achieve natural restoration, resilience, balance, and sustainability.  Exploration of new approaches to design and infrastructure at local and regional scales will include water management, hardened coastlines, sediment and toxics management, marsh and wetland restoration, alternative renewable energy development, reclaimed water and restored natural hydrology, and leveraging the efficiencies and effectiveness of restored natural systems to aid in the control of flooding, remediating drought, and reducing heat island effect.  Additionally, using restoration as the basis for design, students will be introduced to the potential of leveraging capitalism to incentivize environmental restoration.  A science field trip into wetlands acquired and protected by the Army Corps of Engineers on the Charles River will be used to highlight the principle of protecting and restoring nature as a climate resilience strategy.

The course is designed to provide the opportunity to apply these approaches, principles, and methods to student-selected landscapes around the world, exploring options and opportunities.  By identifying and then using heavily altered historic natural systems as their guide for landscape design, students will develop a restoration aesthetic that builds resilience to climate and generates income to pay for change.  Students will also learn to develop strategies for using legal and regulatory frameworks, agency initiatives, and advocates to get projects built.

Though not a prerequisite, Working Landscapes will prove quite useful to students interested in taking Creating Environmental Markets during the Spring semester.  Markets will examine existing environmental markets like the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative and Washington DC’s stormwater trading, as well as the creation of a new market, Blue Cities Exchange, where the use of restoration approaches and methods are the basis for water and pollution trading and preparing for climate change.

The first day of GSD classes, Tuesday, September 5th, is held as a MONDAY schedule. As this course meets only on Tuesdays, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 12th. It will meet regularly thereafter.