Structuring Urban Experience: From the Athenian Acropolis to the Boston Common
This lecture course examines selected cities between the 5th century BC and the 17th century AD, beginning with ancient Athens and ending with the rebuilding of London after the great fire in 1666 and the founding of Boston. It is not, however, a survey. Rather, the lectures take up one city at one “golden moment” of its development and propose a theme or themes for discussion. The course, therefore, is both chronologically and thematically structured.
The first half of the semester addresses the ancient and late antique city, beginning with Athens and continuing with Alexandria, Rome, Constantinople, and Antioch. This section concludes with a consideration of the effects of Christianization on urban form, the widespread decline of urban habitation in the early Middle Ages, and the rising importance of ideal or symbolic “cities of the mind.” The second half of the semester looks at selected instances of Renaissance and Baroque urban interventions, beginning with Florence, returning again to Rome, and then moving to Venice, Madrid, Paris, London, and Boston.
Course format:
Lectures, lecture/discussions, and discussions. Each lecture is normally devoted to one city. It covers urban layout and topography, infrastructure, patterns and types of housing, and typologies of the major monuments and treats in more depth those features relating to the themes for the week—the relation of the city to countryside, for instance, or the city as center of cultural activity, the city and ideas about space, and so on. The lecture/discussion sessions introduce additional material (sometimes a new city, sometimes a more in-depth treatment of one of the assigned readings) and then move to discussion of the lecture and readings. The discussion sessions sometimes compare two cities and sometimes deepen or amplify the themes and ideas covered in the lecture(s) and readings. Students are required to prepare for the discussions by reviewing the relevant lecture(s) (PowerPoints are on the course site), doing the readings, and thinking about how the readings relate to the weekly topic.
Throughout the semester, you will be working on what will become a final research paper of 12 pages of text plus endnotes, illustrations, and a bibliography on a city of your choice during its “golden age.”
Please note this course will meet online through 9/15. The course lectures will be pre-recorded and posted on the course site for asynchronous viewing. All discussion meetings will meet live on Zoom on the following dates: 9/2, 9/9, 9/16, 9/23, 9/30, 10/7, 10/14, 10/21, 10/28, 11/4, and 11/11. The instructor will meet individually with students in person during office hours before 10/7. Additionally, the class meetings in which there are student reports will be in person: 11/16, 11/18, 11/23, 11/30, and 12/2.
Histories of Landscape Architecture I: Textuality and the Practice of Landscape Architecture
This course introduces students to a number of significant topoi or loci in the histories of landscape architecture. In general terms, it takes the form of a conspectus, a survey of the field, but one in which the underlying nature (made and found), boundaries, contours, and texture of this field—in fact several disparate fields—is made the object of close scrutiny. We will define landscape architecture as we survey it. In pursuing an intermittent chronological narrative, the lectures will place site-specific emphasis on a number of cognate disciplines (hydrology, forestry, geology, agronomy, geography, hunting, inter alia), in the context of endemic and transplanted visual and textual traditions. While inspecting the grounds of villas, cloisters gardens, parks, and cities, we will be attentive to surrounding formations of discourse (the pastoral, the picturesque, the emblematic, the Adamic and Edenic) that have and continue to imbue them with meaning.
Please note this course will meet online through 9/15.
Studies of the Built North American Environment: since 1580
North America as an evolving visual environment is analyzed as a systems concatenation involving such constituent elements as farms, small towns, shopping malls, highways, suburbs, and as depicted in fiction, poetry, cartography, television, cinema, and advertising and cybernetic simulation.
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.
Mapping Urbanization: Forms, Processes, and Systems
Urbanization is often framed in terms of human agglomeration. The opening line of the most recent United Nations population dynamics report states that 60% of global population will live in urban areas by 2030, with one in three living in cities with populations exceeding 500,000. While revealing, such metrics positioning urban vs. rural limit the scope of urbanization to the creation, expansion, and densification of cities for human dwelling. Human impact on the world abides not by administrative boundaries. On the contrary, agricultural land – land directly or indirectly devoted to human sustenance – outsizes land devoted to human dwelling 50 to 1.
Urbanization, as material upheaval supporting human metabolism, therefore defies any single notion of boundary, scale, or material composition. Rigorous study of urbanization should capture the dynamics and forms that animate urban life. This includes the temporal encounters and frictions with architecture, nature, mobility systems, legal and political structures, material surfaces, service flows, and more. Drawing the built form of cities is a first step to capturing these interrelationships, but unraveling deliberately opaque dynamics that produce urban life is the true goal.
Mapping Urbanization equips students with the skills to visualize both the ever-changing composition of cities and their metabolic annexes. Through technical workshops, lectures, and spirited reading discussions, students will learn to unpack and draw the aforementioned processes from specific points of view with intended audiences in mind. Moreover, students will develop an intuition for the multiplicity of data. Arguments about the city can be made in either direction, depending upon how data is harnessed. Mapping is therefore both analysis and possibility – making it an indispensable tool to understand and communicate the multi-scalar forms, processes, and systems comprising urbanization.
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 Idea of Environment
The environment is the milieu in which designers and planners operate. It is a messy world of facts, meanings, relations, and actions that calls them to intervene—that is, to make a plan, solve a problem, create a product, or strategize a process. They use various measures to assess and project their interventions from beauty and efficiency to systems and sustainability. Today, increasing volatility and uncertainty of the environment, however, alongside a growing sense and presence of crises and disasters, compels us to reconsider how we have imaged and imagined, defended and critiqued, planned and designed the environment. The class will explore how and what new approaches to representation, visualization, and measurement might lead to different relations in a changing world.
This class is a seminar focused on reading and discussion. Course participants will be required to submit weekly reading responses, to contribute to discussions online and in class, and to develop an original research and/or design project over the course of the semester.
Please note this course will meet online through 9/15.
Theories of Landscape as Urbanism
This course introduces contemporary theories of landscape as a medium of urbanism and product of urbanization. The course surveys sites and subjects, texts and topics describing landscape’s embeddedness in processes of urbanization as well as economic transformations informing the shape of the city. The course introduces students to landscape as a form of cultural production, as a mode of human subjectivity, as a medium of design, as a profession, and as an academic discipline. Through lectures, discussions, readings, and case study projects, students will be introduced to landscape through the lenses of capital, labor, material, subject, and environment. The first half of the course revisits the origins of landscape in response to the societal and environmental challenges of industrialization and the attendant transformations in industrial economy shaping the modern metropolis. The second half of the course repositions recent discourse on landscape as urbanism in relation to the economic and territorial transformations associated with ongoing urbanization at the planetary scale.
The first quarter of the course introduces the origins of landscape as a genre of painting and the invention of the ‘new art’ of landscape architecture as responses to urbanization and their attendant social, economic, and cultural transformations. This portion of the course describes the material and cultural contexts in which landscape was conceived as well as the sites and subjects it invoked. The second quarter of the course describes the emergence of city planning from within landscape architecture and the subsequent impoverishment of the field in the absence of its urban contents. This portion of the course introduces the aspirations and implications of ecologically informed regional planning in the 20th century, as well as the ongoing ideological effects of that agenda in the context of neoliberalism.
The third quarter of the course introduces the discourse and practices of landscape urbanism over the past two decades. This portion of the course surveys the discursive and projective potentials of an ecological urbanism, as distinct from those of ecological planning, and speculates on the recent formulation of projective ecologies, among other discursive formations shaping the field. The final quarter of the course follows the transition from region to territory, and from regional urbanization to planetary urbanization. This portion of the course describes landscape’s role as a medium of cultural production and critical revelation in relation to the increased scale and scope of anthropogenic impacts across the planet.
Course readings, prerecorded video lectures, and supplementary multimedia materials are made available for asynchronous review via Canvas. Weekly discussions sections are led by the Teaching Fellows (13:30-14:45 or 15:00-16:15). All-class meetings are scheduled weekly live via Zoom to discuss questions and comments arising in discussion sections (16:30-17:45). Critical questions address issues of racism and resistance, capitalism and climate, among other topics of contemporary import to landscape architecture. Students are invited to contribute to discussions, prepare brief response papers, and complete a design research dossier on a topic attendant to the course content at the end of the term. The course invites candidates from the Master in Landscape Architecture Program as well as candidates in the Ecologies domain of the Master in Design Studies Program.
Please note this course will meet online through 9/15.
Preparation for Independent Thesis Proposal for MUP, MAUD, or MLAUD
What does it take to complete a graduate thesis in the Department of Urban Planning and Design? The seminar introduces different types of theses that might be produced by students, whether textual, design-focused, or based in some other medium, such as film. It addresses topic and question identification, research methods, case selection, the craft of thesis production, managing the student-advisor relationship, and techniques for verbally defending a thesis.
Over the semester, students identify and refine their thesis topic, solidify their relationship with a thesis advisor, and produce a thesis proposal. By the end of the semester, students will have produced a solid thesis proposal and have the necessary intellectual foundation to complete their thesis by the end of the academic year.
Course meetings combine input from faculty, group discussions, and progress reports by students. The course will include a midterm and final review of students’ proposals, to be attended by faculty and critics.
Please note this course will meet online through 9/15.
The first class meeting will be on Wednesday, September 1st. The rest of the semester, classes will meet during the official scheduled time.
Geaugraphy
‘Neoliberalism’ has given globalization a bad name. But the ‘age’ after World War II has also produced ‘détente’ – ironic word – the disappearance of ‘blocks’ and triggered the elimination of many obstacles to exchange the massive facilitation of all forms of global interaction.
Individual lives do not ‘take place’ in a single geographical location, their episodes are increasingly dispersed. It is only logical that this revolution also demands a new type of biography: not a linear narrative based on sequential chapters, but a layering of simultaneous lives that are now lived in a range of fundamentally different cultures and environments, each engagement profound enough to require its own examination.
In that case, the single memoir becomes an implausible model, it needs to be replaced by a cluster – memoir… a stacking of almost independent stories that reconstruct the internal coherence, causalities, influences, encounters of each separate life.
This is the initial hypothesis on which this course is based. Out of a potential maximum of 10, it will focus on “3 lives”, on Germany, France and Russia and inventorize and interpret the experiences, characters, precedents, traditions, practices, histories in each, as crucial components of a new kind of cumulative identity.
Course Requirements:
Students are required to attend all lectures and submit a term project.
Lectures: To receive credit for the course, students are required to attend three scheduled lectures on April 6, 13, and 27 from 8:00 to 10:00 AM EST. Students interested in enrolling should ensure that they are able to attend all lectures. This course is not open for auditing.
Term Project: Students will develop an original geaugraphic project to be submitted at the end of the term. Students will conduct an exercise in architectural and urban research, taking their local context as subject. Students will devise and present a theoretical explication of their local conditions and their own synthesis of its “uniqueness”. Further details to follow.
NOTE:
If you are interested in enrolling in this 1-unit course, you should add the course to your Crimson Cart. You will officially be enrolled in the course at a later date, and you will not need to file a petition to exceed maximum units if this course would put you over your limit. However, students who enroll in this course would be charged extra tuition if they would exceed the following units by degree program:
20 – MDES
22 – MDE
24 – all other GSD programs
If you are a concurrent student, you would be considered among those who would be charged extra tuition if this course would mean that you would exceed 24 units.
As it is a module 2 course, please be sure that you have added this to your Crimson Cart by March 29.
This one-unit course will consist of three lectures over the course of the term. Lectures are schedule on April 6, 13 and 20 from 8:00 to 10:00 AM EST.
The United States and China
The United States and China are global economic and military powers. They have a rich history of commerce, friendship, alliance, and antagonism. Both countries have been shaped and re-shaped by the nature of their mutual relations. Their relationship is in crisis, the outcome of which will do much to define the world of the 21st century.
This University-wide course invites undergraduates and graduate students to examine together the present and future of U.S.-China relations in the light of their past. What are the enduring patterns and issues in China’s relations with the United States? How have these two countries perceived each other over time? How has trade defined the relationship from the Opium War to Huawei? How has war shaped experiences in the United States and China, and what are the risks of military confrontation today? What are the prospects for cooperation on global crises such as climate change? What is the role of American and Chinese universities, such as Harvard and Tsinghua, in shaping mutual relations in a time of global pandemic?
The course emphasizes active, participant-centered discussions of major issues, texts, and contemporary events, and will engage with Harvard Business School cases, experts on the U.S.-China relationship, and the rich resources of Harvard’s schools and the Harvard Center Shanghai. In their final project, students, working in groups, will address a central challenge in the Chinese-American relationship and propose a solution.
This course has an enrollment cap, so to be considered, you must request permission to enroll and rank your choices through my.harvard by 11:59 p.m. Tuesday, January 19, 2021. The Gen Ed lottery will run Wednesday, January 20, 2021, with approvals and denials sent out no later than 11:59 p.m. that day. Visit the Spring 2021 Gen Ed web page for more information and step-by-step instructions.
You are expected to attend class synchronously weekly at the time listed above. You are also expected to attend a weekly TF-led synchronous section meeting that will be based on your preferences and scheduled after the enrollment deadline.
This is a University course. All students should enroll in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences version of the course, GENED 1068.
Rules for the Electronic Zoo: A Mediatechnics of the Neoliberal Present
Expanding outwards from a lecture bearing the same title, delivered in the spring of 2020, this course explores the technical and political composition of the present. As the term “neoliberalism” has, in recent years, become a ubiquitous category for describing various features of contemporary life, it has arguably also lost much of its conceptual content and specificity. Neoliberalism, it now seems, refers to a kind of vague, gaseous element, which permeates everything from economic discourse to domestic spending habits to construction labor policies.
Against this background, the course will build up a “minor” history of neliberalism’s emergence. If historical-theoretical accounts have thus far overwhelmingly sought to articulate neoliberalism’s political and economic origins, we will work in this course towards the explication of a lesser-known, mediatechnical genealogy, which, without discounting political economy, concentrates instead on spatial histories and theories of automation, information, and environmentalism.
Topics covered include, among others: technics and technology; media, formats and memory; the biopolitical foundations of contemporary urbanism; industrial location theory and the economic geography; individuation, and the spatial politics of neoliberalism; attention, distraction, and the psychopolitics of exhaustion; infrastructure and the managerial politics of environment.
Course structure: Lectures will run for approximately one hour, twice weekly (live), with additional asynchronous content and discussion sessions (time TBD).
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 01/19-01/21. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website. If you need assistance, please contact Estefanía Ibáñez.