The Project and the Territory: Japan Story

What is the future of urbanization?
What role can design play in shaping that future? 
What will happen to the conflicting tensions between urban and rural?
How might technology transform our experience of the physical and social worlds?

This seminar will use the concept of the project, as idea and implementation, to consider contemporary urbanization both reflectively and prospectively. Using an analysis of the development of Japanese cities and regions, and their encounters with disruption and continuity, WWII, Olympics, bubble economy, Kobe earthquake, etc. we aim to question and reimagine the future relations between the physical and social worlds. 

The hybrid and multi-representational method of the seminar will include discussions of architecture, urban design, technology, theory and practice, infrastructure and nature, institutions and memory, as well as the ecologies of literary and visual culture. Though the focus of the seminar will be on Japan, ideas and examples will be considered in the light of parallel developments in other parts of the world. 

The course will include lectures, guest speakers from near and far, and class discussions based on readings, films, photography, and other visual materials. Access to these materials will be provided online for students to consult at their own pace. Over the course of the semester, students will be tasked with investigating an issue of their choice, culminating in a speculative project. 

The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 3rd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Monday, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 3rd. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

Real Estate Investment and the Macroeconomic Environment [Module 2]

Through presentations and discussions, this course explores the value of key macroeconomic concepts in real estate investment decision-making. These concepts include the relationship between economic growth and real estate cycles, the impact of inflation on real estate investing, and the impact of interest rates and the cost of capital on real estate valuation. The course also explores how governmental policy can have an effect on credit markets, the yield curve and cross border capital flows, which in turn affect real estate valuation and investment decision making and risk adjusted returns. Students should have fluency with real estate financial analysis as this topic is not covered in this course.

This course provides students with the knowledge and tools to:

MRE students have prioritized enrollment in the Limited Enrollment Course Lottery. All MRE students who select this special MRE elective in the Lottery will be enrolled, with additional seats potentially available to other students.

Public Transit

In order to meet the emission reduction goals that will allow us to minimize the climate impacts of our cities, urban populations will need to shift towards low-carbon transportation modes. Public transportation, in the form of high-occupancy vehicles transporting passengers on fixed routes and schedules, is one such mode. In this course, students will learn methods for evaluating transit service at the level of the region, the route, and the station in terms of operational and financial feasibility as well as in terms of the passenger experience. Students will develop the skills to plan transit service and develop conceptual designs for transit infrastructure. Students will demonstrate their learning through hypothetical and realistic transit planning projects.

Climate Change, Real Estate, and Public Policy [Module 1]

Climate change is increasingly affecting people and cities worldwide. The impacts of sea level rise, storms, heat waves, droughts, and wildfires are growing. While progress is being made, the world’s climate pollution continues to grow. Meanwhile, resilience and adaptation strategies remain in reactive and early planning stages. There is a lot to do.

Buildings account for more than a third of global climate pollution, and in urban areas, they can account for up to two-thirds of a city’s greenhouse gas emissions. Equitably addressing the climate crisis requires transforming urban development policies and practices in the public, private, and civic sectors. It requires focusing on transformative approaches that invests in people and protect lives and livelihoods from the impacts of climate change.  

In this interdisciplinary course, students will analyze urban development projects and policies in the United States and internationally. They will develop recommendations for how these organizations could better integrate climate change considerations into their work. Through lectures, discussions, interviews, mentorship chats, and guest speakers, students will explore topics such as building retrofits, strategic relocation, revised land use regulations, grey and green infrastructure, building-scale emissions limits, energy efficiency retrofits, renewable energy deployment, and building electrification.

A major component of this course is a student-directed, faculty-advised project to support deep-dive exploration of a specific climate action topic of interest to the student. Previous projects have focused on low-income solar deployment, energy-efficient redevelopment of public housing, university decarbonization strategies, real estate strategies for residential decarbonization, workforce development for building retrofits, climate-informed economic analyses, community-driven climate migration, public-private financing strategies for adaptation, equity-centered building decarbonization policies, and more. The course supports each cohort’s interests and career aspirations at the intersection of climate change, real estate, and public policy.

Students will interview practitioners in the field, targeting interviews with those with whom they may wish to work in the future. They will also participate in a multi-party negotiation simulation to gain experience with the wide range of competing interests, perspectives, and challenges of urban development in a changing climate. They will hear from professionals in community development, climate banks, public policy, urban planning, and more. Optional brown bag lunches after class offer opportunities to continue discussions, discuss climate-focused careers and job searches, and network with guest speakers and other invited guests. Several hours of office hours are typically available after lunch for students to gain feedback on their project.

This course is a six-week accelerator program that builds community among students. It attracts a diverse cohort of students, including many cross-registrants, from fields such as real estate, public policy, urban planning, public health, engineering, technology, architecture, and business. In addition to supporting greater understanding of the field, the course is designed to help students advance meaningful climate careers at the intersection of urban development, public policy, and community needs shaped by the climate crisis.
 

Constructing Consensus through Collaboration: Stakeholder Management in Real Estate [Module 1]

“It takes a village” to develop a real estate project is more than just a clever catch-phrase. In any city around the world, assembling and working with the people who can make or break a real estate project, especially the ones that look perfect on paper, is a crucial tactical and strategic skill. From advocacy groups, to the public at large, to community groups, to elected officials, fostering thoughtful relationships with these individuals and groups is critical to the success of any real estate project. Using real world examples that highlight the importance of stakeholder engagement, this course will focus on teaching students how bringing people along can be the key to getting hard projects done.

After completing this course, students will be able to determine which elected officials, community members/groups, and advocacy groups can impact a real estate project positively or negatively. Students will be able to craft public relations and government relations strategies for interfacing with those key stakeholders in order to support real estate projects or defend against criticism. Students will also know which experts and consultants to partner with to add to their own capabilities. Students will be able to build well rounded project teams that can accomplish the most difficult projects and weather the most challenging storms.

The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 3rd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Tuesday, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 10th. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

MRE students have prioritized enrollment in the Limited Enrollment Course Lottery. All MRE students who select this special MRE elective in the Lottery will be enrolled, with additional seats potentially available to other students.

Negotiating Actionable Plans

Planners are increasingly called upon to respond to interests and values of stakeholders, diverse parties, concerned citizens, governing entities, and the general public. Cross cutting issues often require integrated activities across multiple disciplines, such as the need for climate change plans to balance decisions of land use, housing, transportation, environmental protection, and equity. 

This world of complexity can feel as though one is diving into the seeming chaos of a Jackson Pollock painting. How can one make sense of and effectively respond to such planning challenges? Some five decades ago, experimentation among planners yielded the field of public policy mediation. Since then, planners have applied and adapted negotiation, facilitation, consensus building, and public engagement processes to build actionable plans to address complex problems.

This course will focus on developing a set of nested and increasingly advanced skills of negotiation and consensus building. It will focus on three questions: What contributes to productive negotiations? How do we analyze complex circumstances to identify critical components to work toward resolution? How do we design consensus building processes, tailored to unique situational characteristics, to build actionable plans?

By exploring these questions, this course will help students develop skills to be better negotiators. They will learn to prepare to negotiate, negotiate purposefully and thoughtfully, and critically evaluate outcomes and experiences. 

After negotiation basics, the course will focus on skills of planners as problem solvers. Students will practice facilitation and mediation skills, including the ability to simultaneously consider multiple perspectives on issues amidst unbridgeable difference. They will learn to conduct assessments of complex problems on provided cases and cases of personal interest. Finally, efforts will turn to the design of processes for productive negotiations among diverse parties that integrate public input and technical information. 

The course will be highly interactive and practice-based. It will use exercises and role plays, videos, self-selected policy cases, discussions, and lecturettes to highlight key ideas. The varied case examples will cover issues including land use, development, housing, environment, abortion, and indigenous sacred lands.
 

The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 3rd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Monday, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 3rd. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

Moral Leadership: Ethics in Public Life (at HKS)

This course, offered at HKS as DPI-202, examines moral leadership in the context of professional public service. It focuses on cultivating proficiency in a range of skills that together help to ground moral action. These skills include: 1) accurately perceiving the moral dimensions of situations that arise in public service, 2) adequately weighing moral tradeoffs that have to be made as part of strategic action, and 3) effectively putting into reflective equilibrium, the verdicts of the heart and those of the head. Additionally, the course promotes 4) the capacity to entertain different moral perspectives, that is, the ability to temporarily live in another person’s moral universe and see the world through their eyes. The ability to do this well is an essential component to successfully practicing the skills needed for virtuous action. The class will be largely case-based, but also introduce moral and political theory and material from adjacent fields as needed to work through the cases. We will also prominently integrate quite a number of movies, both for the sake of making the cases come alive and to conceptualize how media representation of human experience can influence how people think about challenges.

This course is offered by HKS as DPI 202. 

The course will meet on Mondays and Wednesdays in Rubenstein 306. The review session takes place on Fridays in Littauer 130. See HKS website for pre-semester shopping information. 

Note that this course follows the HKS academic calendar, which has an irregular start of term with Monday, Friday, September 6th held as a Monday. The first class meeting will be on Friday, September 6th. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

HKS Shopping Days are September 3-4. See Shopping Day schedule for more information. 

Indigenous Philosophies for the Technological Age (at HKS)

The future of humanity depends on how we will manage to live with the technological revolutions that happen all around us. This is a good time to bring voices into the discussion that have long been excluded from impactful discussions about the future of humanity: voices of indigenous people, whose received wisdom reflects millennia of sustainable living in their respective contexts. Some of this wisdom has been worked out in distinctive indigenous philosophies, and the focus of this class is to explore some of these philosophies and assess what lessons they teach for the technological age. A focus is on indigenous authors from the U.S., but we encounter authors and perspectives from all continents. Topics we explore through the lens of indigenous philosophies include attitudes towards nature; views on technology generally; the Anthropocene; traditional ecological knowledge; artificial intelligence; genome-editing; geo-engineering; human rights; and the meaning of life. Engaging with indigenous perspectives on these matters is likely to have a transformative effect on how one approaches the big questions of the 21st century.

This course is offered by HKS as DPI 210. The course will meet in Wexner 436. See HKS website for pre-semester shopping information. 

Note that this course follows the HKS academic calendar, which has an irregular start of term with Monday, Friday, September 6th held as a Monday. The first class meeting will be on Friday, September 6th. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

HKS Shopping Days are September 3-4. See Shopping Day schedule for more information. 

Local Economic Development: Turning Theory into Practice

Cities are complex hubs of economic and social activity, conducive to efficient means of production. They also present challenging circumstances of inequity, segregation, and political power struggles. In this class, we begin with a formal introduction to the economics and fiscal operations of cities and the theoretical foundations for urban and local development.  What does ‘local economic development’ even mean or encompass from a municipal management or planning perspective? We explore planning and policy approaches to local economic development, such as people- versus place-based strategies, and grapple with their implications for economic wellbeing and equity. We consider local economic development holistically, drawing on insights from local public finance, land use, housing, workforce and small-business development, urban politics, and urban planning. The class provides students with a survey of classic and contemporary literature and casework on local economic development policies, as well as technical knowledge to design actual development interventions. Class discussions will incorporate actual cases of urban economic development scenarios, presentations from practitioners, and local field trips.

Digital Media: Not Magic

According to folklore, Michelangelo fell to his knees upon seeing the Florentine fresco Annunciation, went silent, and eventually concluded that the image of the Virgin must have been made through divine intervention since its brushwork surpassed human talents. When the computer graphics company Blue Sky released its commercial for Chock Full o’Nuts in 1994, The New York Times called the rendering of a walking and talking coffee bean “computer magic.” It was the best way to explain the video’s special effects. What else would one call using lines of code to give an inanimate object life? Or the transfiguration of mere paint into saintly likeness?

Esoteric processes have long imbued artforms with power, rendering audiences speechless, awestruck, and affected. In the nineties, anthropologist Alfred Gell proposed that mundane things can be construed as “enchanted forms” when differences exist between an audience’s technological expectations and an object’s facture. This contradiction gives rise to a belief that artifacts and artisans can possess otherworldly faculties. In reality, everyday forms become enchanted not through magic, but through precise construction methodologies.

This course seeks to articulate what aesthetic categories are at play when technology is perceived to be magical. A working theory for the class is that more nuanced descriptions for the transformations found in computational and craft traditions are good frameworks for understanding architectural effects. We will explore these ideas in synchronous lectures and case studies, and asynchronous workshops. Readings include texts by Alfred Gell, Walter Benjamin, Beatriz Colomina, and Felicity Scott. Case studies include projects by Anne Holtrop, Ensamble, Junya Ishigami, and examples from imperial architecture.

Note: Class discussion is held in a debate format.