Urban Planning Theory and Praxis: Comparative-Historical Origins and Applications
This course takes as its point of departure the historical and national origins of planning as a discipline, assesses its evolution over time and across developmental contexts, and situates our understanding of what has come to constitute “planning theory” in a deeper understanding of the political, economic, and social specificities and constraints on planning action. In understanding what might be referred to as planning praxis, we not only examine those social structures and economic as well as political power relations that enable or constrain preference for certain policies and processes of decision-making. We also examine the history of ideas about cities, debates over how the built environment should be designed and/or governed, and address longstanding conflicts over who should have the legitimacy or authority to undertake such decisions. The time span that we examine during this course begins in the late-19th and early 20th century and ends in the contemporary era.
Upon completion of this course, students will understand the main theoretical and praxis traditions that underpin contemporary approaches to urban planning, especially in the US and Europe, but also in global-comparative perspective. They will be able to relate contemporary theoretical and praxis traditions to earlier rounds of debate and political struggle regarding urbanization as well as the attempt to plan, manage and modify its socio-spatial expressions and ecological consequences. In the process, they will understand the historical connections between the disciplines of architecture, urban design, landscape architecture, and urban planning.
Additionally, students will be well equipped to assess the underlying normative, conceptual and political assumptions that mediate major contemporary approaches to urban planning and policy, globally and locally. This will entail becoming acquainted with social science approaches to the study of cities and urbanization and relating those approaches to the study of planning and design strategies across contexts and scales. Finally, students will be in a position to assess planning discourses—for instance, regarding social and spatial justice, equity, diversity, and sustainability—and will be able to relate them to ongoing social struggles to imagine and create alternative urban worlds. In the most general sense, this course will help students build critical capacities for understanding and contributing to efforts to shape and reshape urban life through the planning, design, and policy disciplines.
Histories and Theories of Urban Form and Design
This course provides an introduction to the critical histories and theories of urban intervention and formation, and to the disciplinary practices of urban design in relation to planning and the broader technological, institutional, economic, social and political contexts in which they operate over time and across cultures and geographies. Beginning in the mid 19th century, the course uses historical and theoretical readings and case studies of specific projects (built and unbuilt) to ground theoretical ideas, modes and models of practice in the material and discursive contexts in which those ideas and practices have emerged and operated since the beginning of captialist urbanization to the present day. The emphasis is on plural histories and plural readings of the processes of urban formation through multiple theoretical and critical lenses. We will focus on key episodes of transformation and paradigm-shift that allow us to explore a range of critical frameworks and methodologies for understanding emerging conditions of the contemporary urban historically, theoretically, and spatially across scales, and to situate the processes, debates, and projects that have shaped urban environments in larger discourses that foreground issues of social equity and identity, power, privilege, race, and gender. It connects the historical narrative to contemporary transformations and to the challenges presented by emergent urban problems, crises, and struggles across places, territories and scales.
Topics include: industrialization and capitalist urbanization: regulating the capitalist city; Garden City; Planned Metropolis; Parks Movement and City Beautiful; the Modernist City; Chicago School; the racialization of space, exclusionary zoning, redlining + suburbanization; regionalism; the Socialist City; CIAM in Europe, Asia, North Africa, and Latin America; urban renewal, Civil Rights and the struggle for the city; advocacy planning + design in the US; the emergence of urban design as bridge-practice; postindustrial city; privatization, market rationalism + the withdrawal of the state; critiques of modernist urbanism; the semantic dimension of urban form + space; typomorphology + collage; landscape + ecological methodologies; preservation + alteration; New Urbanism; justice planning; the contradictions of informality; seeing from the South; design and planning for climate change; reparative planning and design.
First year Urban Design students have prioritized early enrollment in 4151 and 4496. The Histories and Theories of Urban Design lottery (HTUD lottery) will open on Tuesday, January 10 at 9 AM and close on Friday, January 13, at 9 AM. First Year UD students must submit selections by the deadline to ensure enrollment via this lottery.
Histories of Landscape Architecture II
Designed gardens and landscapes are cultural artifacts that encompass three main expectations: pragmatic needs, cultural significance, and aesthetic order. Although some landscape narratives often ignore needs (those of the users or the environment’s), reduce cultural meanings to a discourse on style, and focus on order as a problem in aesthetic theory, the fact remains that, almost without exception, one or more of these three criteria—needs, meanings, order—dominates the designed gardens and landscapes of every time and place. However, because gardens and landscapes are ephemeral and subject to many transformations, this course will consider their practical, cultural, and aesthetic aspects as embedded in a palimpsest of changing values. In order to do this, the course will not be structured around landscape architectural styles. Rather, it will examine a selection of topics that bring together thinkers and designers who live/have lived centuries apart. This will allow the class to unfold several issues that have shaped the profession through built work and intellectual inquiry, such as the recent reckoning about the discipline’s role and agenda, questions of race and the implicit violence of white archives and memorials, and the limits of the commonly accepted, tripartite taxonomy of nature—pristine, productive and genteel, with its implicit prioritization of the latter category at the expense of the first two or of anything in between.
Instructor’s talks will address contemporary designs alongside those conceived and implemented by our predecessors. Within this structure, instead of construing history as “the past,” we will consider, with Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, that every history is “contemporary history”: no matter how chronologically remote the facts under consideration may seem to be, in reality the writing of history always reflects, and is shaped by, present circumstances.
Buildings, Texts, and Contexts: Origins and Ends
Our aim is to address the general rupture caused by the rise of modernity—that is, by the social, economic, technological, and ideological transformations accompanying the political and industrial revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This was an age of internationalization in design practices and issues, a process that was accompanied by technological transformation and utopian thinking as well as by rising tensions linked to social inequality, colonial expansionism, and political upheaval. Our work in this course will look at the three pillars of buildings, texts, and contexts in order to find the equilibrium between, on the one hand, localized historical narratives and, on the other, the sampling to which a global purview necessarily gives rise.
The transition of architecture to the modern world prompts a series of fundamental questions: How did historical conditions place pressure on the tradition-bound parameters of architecture, on its origins, theories, and pedagogies? How did new conditions of scientific possibility actively reconfigure architecture’s relation to engineering and ideologies of progress? And how, finally, did aesthetic conceptions and approaches, which trace an arc from the demise of the Vitruvian tradition to eclecticism, historicism, and rationalist avant-gardes, intersect with gender, race, society, and politics?
This course weaves these questions through topics and themes ranging from technology and utopia to ornament and imperialism. We begin with late Baroque polemics and the disintegration of the Classical system. We consider the multifaceted nature of eighteenth- century architectural expressions in such examples as: the ideal city from royal Jaipur to revolutionary Paris, the split between architects and engineers; origin myths and the status of history; and the formulation of building typologies from churches and factories to slave plantations in colonial contexts. The nineteenth century, which for us is inaugurated by a utopian imaginary, covers key episodes such as utopian socialism in the context of the Industrial Revolution, town planning and racial politics after the Civil War, the Beaux-Arts system in Europe, China, and the Americas, the intertwining of ornament and British imperialism in India, the collision of vernacular traditions and colonial modernity in Africa, and, finally, the global dream of colossal structures and the infrastructural programs of the modern metropolis.
Theories and Practices of Landscape Architecture
What do you need to know in order to understand this landscape? How do design culture and design thinking transform over time? How are cultural values embedded in the design of landscapes? This course is framed in terms of the relationship of landscape architecture to the evolving theorizations of nature and culture. In each class, we will map various critical assumptions, ideologies, and aspirations that inform how landscape is designed and interpreted. By learning to read landscapes and related projects of landscape architecture, we will study the constructedness of landscape. Conversely, we will also examine the capacities of landscape architecture to shape identity and ecology, reproduce or contest power relations and inequality, and commemorate diverse cultural meaning.
The course elaborates a working definition of theory as it relates to landscape practice. It contextualizes the discipline’s transition from a modernist paradigm in the West, to the gradual eradication of conceptual binaries and the pluralization of narratives in the late twentieth century. It considers landscape’s ‘social’ engagements to include non-human actors, and concludes with recent materialist approaches to landscape that emphasize its performance and flows in the era of global warming.
The course weaves together three kinds of investigations: one that focuses on built forms, another on the ideas and conceptual frameworks that guide the production of those forms, and a third that examines the retrospective interpretation of those forms. We will attend to diverse projects and topics, that may include border regions, urban landscapes, agricultural landscapes, colonial plantations, scientific gardens, territories of extraction, zones of environmental risk, successional forests, migrating ecosystems, national parks, native lands, domestic spheres, and postcolonial gardens. Through these sites, we will critically explore the spatial forms of exclusion, inclusion, conflict, and cooperation between and among people and their surroundings.
At the end of this class, students will understand the value and make use of theory in design, will be able to articulate the diverse intellectual, social, and political dimensions of landscapes, and to refer to a history of landscape architecture projects oriented to related issues. Students will also be able to articulate their priorities within the discipline. Assignments will include a combination of case study presentations, written responses to assigned readings and hands-on exercises designed to train students in the analysis of landscapes.
This course is open to all Harvard GSD students and also accepts cross-registered students.
Thesis project / Project Thesis
As the culminating effort for the Master of Architecture degree, a “Thesis” entails multiple expectations. It is a demonstration not only of competency and expertise, but of originality and relevance. A thesis is an opportunity to conceive and execute work that is both a specific project (delimited in scope, with a specific set of appropriate deliverables) as well as a declaration of a wider “Project” (possessing disciplinary value, and contributing to a larger discourse). This class will address both valences of the architectural “project,” while providing space for students to develop methodological approaches for their own thesis. Over the course of a series of lectures and seminars, we will study the theory and practice of the architectural thesis by examining its institutional history and disciplinary development, in order to understand the conventions and possibilities of the format. In workshop sessions, as preparation for their own theses, students will work towards the articulation of their topics. This will include: identifying relevant precedents and existing literature; defining a site and program (however broad); and working through first iterations of working methods. With these efforts, the aim of the course is for students to be equipped to undertake a thesis project in every sense.
Confronting Climate Change: A Foundation in Science, Technology and Policy (FAS)
How can we address the issue of climate change, reducing the damages by preparing for impacts already underway and fixing the problem by transforming our energy system?
This course will consider the challenge of climate change and what to do about it. Students will be introduced to the basic science of climate change, including the radiation budget of the Earth, the carbon cycle, and the physics and chemistry of the oceans and atmosphere. We will look at reconstructions of climate change through Earth history to provide a context for thinking about present and future changes. We will take a critical look at climate models used to predict climate change in the future, and discuss their strengths and weaknesses, evaluating which forecasts of climate change impacts are robust, and which are more speculative. We will spend particular time discussing sea level rise and extreme weather (including hurricanes, heat waves, and floods). We will look at the complex interactions between climate and human society, including climate impacts on agriculture and the relationship between climate change, migration and conflict. We will also discuss strategies for adapting to climate change impacts, and the implications of those strategies for sub-national and international equity.
The last half of the class will consider what to do about climate change. First, we will review the recent history of greenhouse gas emissions, as well as various national and international efforts to limit them in the future. We will discuss reducing carbon emissions using forestry, agriculture and land use, and then focus on how to transform the world’s energy system to eliminate CO2 emissions. We will conclude by examining different strategies for accelerating changes in our energy systems to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
The course is intended as a foundational course on climate change for students from around the university, preparing them for more specialized courses in their individual concentrations or degree programs. No prerequisites are required; students will be encouraged to apply their different preparations and interests to the various individual and group assignments. The course emphasizes the scientific and technological aspects of climate change (including the clean energy transition), but in the context of current issues in public policy, business, design and public health.
This is a University course. All students should enroll in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences version of the course, GENED 1094.
Contemporary Developing Countries: Entrepreneurial Solutions to Intractable Problems (at FAS)
What problems do developing countries face, and how can individuals contribute to solutions rather than await the largesse of the state or other actors? Intractable problems – such as lack of access to education and healthcare, forced reliance on contaminated food, deep-seated corruption – are part of the quotidian existence of the vast majority of five of the world’s seven billion people. Developing societies suffer from what we refer to as ‘institutional voids’ that make organized activities of all sorts difficult; think of the mundane but important physical infrastructure that allows us to get to work or school in the developed world, as well as our access to higher-order institutions such as the availability of information at our fingertips or the security of the rule of law. The course demonstrates that reflecting upon the nature of the developing world’s intractable problems through different lenses helps characterize candidate interventions to address them. The scientist’s hypothesis-driven and iterative experimentation, the artist’s imagined counterfactuals through putting oneself in others’ shoes literally and theatrically, and the planner’s top-down articulation of boundary conditions, all tailor the ultimate solution.
Prerequisites: None.
Jointly offered courses: Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) as GENED 1011.
Open to cross-registration for students from other schools and universities. May accept a limited number of auditors, pending instructor approval.
There is no class Monday September 5, Monday October 10, or Wednesday November 23.
Please note that the class will initially meet in Emerson 105. After that, the course will move to Sever Hall 113
Topology and Imagination: Between Chinese Landscapes and Architecture
This course deals with landscape architecture and architecture in contemporary China. Its purpose is twofold: to articulate new perspectives on the challenges facing designers, and to demonstrate the pertinence of issues to a broader range of international discussions.
There are three major aspects involved:
– An expanded vocabulary for understanding design challenges in both urban and rural settings. We shall discuss a range of terms, taken from local Chinese discussions and from Western contexts, that can enable a more precise grasp of issues. In particular, the understanding of Chinese gardens in terms of topology (from the work of Zhu Guangya) shows a way for going beyond the idea of static “composition.”
– Detailed case studies that draw on a broad range of images documenting both design process and construction process. Our goal is to go beyond the usual presentation of design projects in six- or eight-page magazine articles and to attend to process and contingency. The main topics will include: redundant precision versus apparent precision in construction (from the work of Francesca Hughes), hi-fi versus lo-fi architecture (from the work of Jeremy Till), perspectival and aperspectival effects, and proactive intervention in the chain of supply of building materials.
– Cultural dimensions relevant for the understanding of architectural and landscape experience. This part of our study will involve both reading texts (in English translation) and analyzing extant gardens. The main topics will include: long-term and short-term memory, the pitfalls of thinking in dualistic dichotomies, the opportunities presented by different kinds of clientele, and the limitations of various kinds of regionalism.
Course enrollment is limited to thirty. Ten spots will be prioritized for Landscape Architecture students and ten spots will be prioritized for Architecture students who are taking this course to meet their BTC requirement. All prioritized students must select the course first in the lottery.
Note on schedule: The class will meet synchronously on Tuesdays from 10:30 to 11:45 am. Every week there will be 60-90 minutes of asynchronous materials (lectures or seminar presentations). During weeks 4-12, the course will invite a range of designers and scholars from several countries as speakers or discussants. Please note that in 2-3 weeks of the semester, the class will meet with the guest speakers from 8 to 9 am ET (instead of the usual 10:30-11:45 am slot) due to time zone constraints. The online pre-recorded format allows for a much more international range of speakers and discussants, and the 60-90 min lectures on case studies will allow us to get a much more detailed understanding of projects than can be obtained from 6-8 page articles.
Due to the Labor Day holiday, this course will meet for the first time at its standard time on Wednesday, August 31st.
Making the American City: Form and Society
This course examines major episodes in the history of American urban growth, design, and planning to understand the urgent social, environmental, and development issues of today.
It traces the growth and elaboration of North American cities in four major periods of urban history from the early European settlement to the present, with an emphasis on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Through the study of plans, physical projects, and material conditions, Making the American City investigates specific topics, such as the downtown; homes and housing; public parks and landscapes; planned communities and civic spaces; homes and housing; transportation systems; environmental threats and disasters; the provision of infrastructure; racial and ethnic settlement patterns; slums and ghettos; bohemias and art districts; urban renewal and revitalization; gentrification; public landscapes and spaces; and suburbia in all its diversity.
The objective of the course is to use history to inform the thinking and practice of contemporary designers, planners, and policy makers. Students enrolled in the course will gain a fundamental knowledge of the major events that have contributed to the form and character of modern American cities. The format of the course will be lectures and class discussions. The method of evaluation will be short student papers on projects or subjects chosen from different periods of the history of the American city. There are no prerequisites.
This course is jointly listed with HKS as SUP 612.