Spatial Design Strategies for Climate- and Conflict-Induced Migration

Climate change presents an urgent global challenge with far-reaching implications for human societies and all other species inhabiting the planet. Over the next few decades, extreme climate zones and uninhabitable areas are projected to expand, driven by factors such as water stress, food insecurity, extreme heat, sea level rise, and weather-related disasters such as storms and wildfires. These challenges are already driving instability and increasing displacement, forcing individuals and communities to leave behind the spaces and cultures they have inhabited for generations.

As of 2024, an estimated 120 million people are displaced (UNHCR), with projections suggesting this number may rise significantly, disproportionally impacting individuals and communities historically the least responsible for the climate crisis.

This project-based seminar will examine migration induced by climate and conflict, which often intersect, in one of the most volatile hotspots in the world, the Sahel. The Sahel region has been grappling with the root causes and the multidimensional consequences of climate change for a long time; colonization, extensive resource extraction, conflict, and militarization. In the region, new trends in migration are observed, and local, national, and international policies and protocols for humanitarian contingency planning are currently being developed in response.

In the Sahel, traditional lifestyles such as nomadic pastoralism and transhumance have thrived for millennia in extreme weather conditions, offering valuable lessons in adaptability and perseverance in times of crisis and resource scarcity. 

In the seminar, the class will engage with diverse stakeholders and viewpoints from theory and practice. We will have conversations with representatives of United Nations agencies, including the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), which possess real-time data and field experience. Drawing on their data sets and engaging in dialogue with local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and community representatives, we will develop a case study focused on climate migration in the Sahel, with particular attention to the situation in Mauritania, where local and international organizations are working together to support the country’s open-door policy and its efforts to host refugees from the region (and keep them from reaching Europe).

Sessions will include meetings with diverse stakeholders, interaction with UN agencies, non-governmental organizations and representative of local communities, and in-class workshops for project development that include spatial analyses of migration trends and scenario exercises. To attend the class, students are required to have knowledge of spatial design (architecture, urban and landscape architecture) along with basic mapping skills.

Community-Informed Urban Design

In Community-Informed Urban Design, we will explore the role of urban design, architecture, and placemaking in shaping social conditions within the built environment. We will critically examine how design decisions have disproportionately impacted those most vulnerable, exacerbating existing disparities based on race, ethnicity, class, gender, religion, and age. Students must define their social responsibility and will directly confront social frameworks to explore avenues for reparative urban design.

Throughout the course, we will review historical design injustices and unveil the benefit of healing, trauma-informed, and community-driven alternatives. Our focus will center on two primary vulnerable populations: system-impacted communities and the unhoused. Marginalized and criminalized by society, these communities have been further failed by designers who concretize these value judgements spatially. To challenge implicit bias that compounds across the built environment, students will utilize numerous qualitative and quantitative research methods, alongside design-thinking to produce empathetic, data-driven solutions.

We will learn and deploy various community engagement practices, such as interviews, surveys, focus groups, intercepts, and online engagement tools. In light of the course’s sensitive topics, there will be special attention to cultural competency and best practices specific to vulnerable populations. Students will be evaluated on projects that incorporate design, policy, and financing that advocate for these communities, for justice, and that aim to repair past harms and improve outcomes well into the future.

Interdisciplinarity is strongly encouraged. Students across the GSD and from other areas of interest are welcome to enroll.

Foundations of Distressed Debt and Turnarounds: Tactics of Law, Finance and Negotiation [Module 1]

Virtually every career will encounter unanticipated outcomes. 

This half-semester course presents a curriculum of commercial real estate restructurings and distressed debt that involve risk analysis, legal considerations, and negotiation from the considered perspectives of owners, investors, lenders, tenants, employees, employees, policymakers, and society. The module utilizes real-world case studies that require a synthesis of structuring, valuation, and financial analysis.       

The course is designed for graduate-level students with a variety of backgrounds who demonstrate a curiosity in learning how to create value from otherwise fractured situations.  
 

MRE students who want to take this course should enter the Limited Enrollment Course Lottery and will be automatically enrolled.

Policy Analysis: A Tool for Evidence-Based Decision Making

Policy analysis is problem solving.  It involves making systematic comparisons across a set of alternatives to address a particular policy or planning problem, usually in the face of time and resource constraints.  Typically, policy analysis is done to provide advice to a client, organization, or another decision-maker in the face of a public problem or crisis.  It involves rapid response, quickly orienting yourself to new and changing topics that often are complex and controversial.  How to develop doable solutions that target the core problem at hand? How to weigh the many competing trade-offs among diverse stakeholders?  How to balance innovation with pragmatism?  In this class we will develop strategies to address these, and other, challenges. 

While the course will emphasize the development of a stage-based analytical approach, we will also discuss alternative models of policy analysis and consider critical perspectives from political science, behavioral science and design fields.

Based largely on case discussions, the class will explore the choices facing decision makers in the public and nonprofit sectors in the US and abroad with regard to a wide range of issues, including public health, environmental protection, urban development, transportation and infrastructure.  We will also have a unit on cost benefit analysis and how to incorporate it into this analytical toolbox.  We will approach CBA from a critical perspective and consider its limitations in the face of scarce information and equity concerns. 

This is a methods course: we will use a variety of cases to practice and become nimble in the logic and techniques behind policy analysis, rather than becoming an expert in any one subject area.  Students will develop their own analyses and learn how to communicate them in written memos, oral argument, and visual presentations. The course will culminate in a team project in which students conduct a simulated policy analysis exercise on a current issue.

Making Participation Relevant to Design

By trying to understand how participation can make design more relevant to society, we can create more socially just cities. This course starts from the premise that it would not be ethical to design cities without creating meaningful conversations with different stakeholders. Our main challenge is to improve the quality and ethics of design work by staying in close contact with the city and its residents.

Participation is a way of confronting our preconceptions, revealing our blind spots, and/or supporting our intuitions in a context where architecture, urbanism, and other design-related fields are becoming more and more complex and multilayered. Participation is not an end, it is a means: a powerful tool that establishes new connections and boosts both creativity and the production of new ideas. Likewise, participation allows the construction of a collective dialogue that will engage people in different ways, formats, and temporalities. Participation is a method to enable the creation of more democratic, inclusive, and open-ended environments, redefining the very concept of citizenship.
– How can designers reimagine participatory decision-making processes?
– How should design participation unfold in an ever-changing reality?
– What improves communication and enhances creative dialogue?
– Can participatory design lead to open-ended processes or outcomes?

Among other strategies deployed to answer these questions, the class will focus on the potential contribution of digital technologies as a means for linking participation to design. Technology opens new opportunities for revealing multiple layers of meaning. It also allows the exchange of information and creation of new possibilities that together can transform the way we behave. Technology, in short, enables us to better relate and interact with each other and our surroundings, thus lowering the barriers for citizen engagement.

Throughout the semester, we will look for alternative means and untapped opportunities to identify and develop socially and technologically innovative approaches, methodologies, and tools. Students will be asked to combine technical skills and knowledge production with a social sensibility to access the direct experience of reality while also producing forms of empowerment that come from involving the relevant actors in transformative processes.

The Development Project

The course places students in the role of developer of an international or domestic site for which they will produce project proposals that meet financial, market, regulatory, design, environmental, and social metrics for successful development. The interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of real estate practice will be experienced by real estate students working in teams with urban design, architecture, planning, and landscape architecture students enrolled by lottery in two option studios expressly paired with the class. Real estate and option studio students will visit their international or domestic sites early in the semester and meet with stakeholders. The final review will reveal fully realized and realistic development proposals.

This course is required for and limited to sudents in the GSD Master in Real Estate Program.

Real Estate students will travel with GSD Option Studios to visit international and domestic sites and meet with project stakeholders. Students traveling to international sites will be term-billed $300 and those participating in the domestic site will be term-billed $150. All students are responsible for meals and incidentals. See the GSD Travel Safety and Guidelines website for additional information. 

Transition as Condition: Urban Form and Environment

The fixed categories by which we have traditionally understood the urban no longer hold. They have been undermined by the multiplicity of disparate urban formations that are transforming landscapes across the globe. These transformations radically challenge not only normative planning methods, but also traditional concepts of the urban, and even our ability to understand the dynamics of change. How can we understand the conditions of change, extreme differentiation, and hybridity that challenge current conceptual models and practices? How might the insights of history and theory inform one another as well as design practices more effectively?

The purpose of the seminar is to engage these questions and to explore a range of critical frameworks and research methodologies for understanding emerging conditions of the contemporary urban — historically, theoretically, and spatially across scales.

Transition as Condition: Urban Form and Environment takes as its starting point two working propositions that are implicit in the course title. The first puts forward a conception of urban form as dynamic and active — that is, as a process of urban formation in which transition is a continuous condition. The second working proposition is that in order to understand the generative dynamics of transitional urban conditions we need to develop new methodologies for understanding change and difference, methodologies that make it possible to chart continuities and discontinuities, to map relationships between the local and the translocal, and to examine complex and unstable phenomena over time and through multiple critical lenses. In short, our research needs to be both site-specific and comparative across geographies, cultures, and scales.

These propositions will be engaged in the seminar through readings and class discussions, and individual research projects. Over the course of the semester readings and discussions will focus on a series of theoretical frameworks that conceptualize emerging urban formations in categorically transitional terms — that is, in terms of post-industrial, post-Fordist, post-modern, post-Cold War, post-disaster, and other formations. These transitional categories are framed both in relation to historically based urban paradigms that posit a relationship between social, political, and economic processes and systems (industrial, Fordist, socialist, soviet, modern, liberal) and urban spatial forms. We will interrogate these concepts as epistemological categories, examine the paradigms on which they are based, and work to develop critical methods and visual techniques for site-based research of contemporary urban environmental conditions.

In the second part of the semester students will apply these methodologies to the analysis of a particular urban site or intervention in a city or other urban environment and geography of their choice. The topics for these individual research projects will be determined in consultation with the instructor within the first 6 weeks of the semester. The final project will have a written and visual/graphic component. The project will also be presented in class at the end of the semester.

 

Cotton Kingdom, Now

In 1852, the New York Daily Times commissioned a 31-year-old Frederick Law Olmsted to conduct an immersive research journey through the Southern slave states. The country was headed toward civil war, and the paper dispatched young Olmsted for his ability to reveal the cultural and environmental qualities of landscape in a narrative voice. Today, landscape architecture, urban design, and planning—disciplines Olmsted helped to shape—continue to grapple with the economic, political, and ecological conditions rooted in systems he documented so vividly 165 years ago. This seminar will investigate the relationship between a host of major contemporary issues with the documented conditions in Olmsted’s 1861 book, Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom. The seminar positions Olmsted’s journey not only as source material but also as methodological proposition, in reflection on the significance and methods of research and representation in design practice.

Eco-Machinae: Environmental Machines and Material Mechanisms

They are at work all around us, why haven’t we seen them? This seminar will aim to define a family of tools – environmental machines – intentionally designed constructs that perform tasks centered on assessing, adjusting, or altering the environment.  

What roles do Eco-Machinae play in sensing, shaping, restoring, or collaborating with their environments? How do they interface with ecological systems, and how are these interfaces evolving in response to new technologies and growing environmental pressures? We will investigate this under-addressed, never-clearly-defined type of machines that have so far escaped conventional historiographies yet will determine our relationship and interactions with the environment in the future.

This seminar will answer these questions through theory and exploration. While we have developed advanced human-machine and even machine-machine interfaces, the ways machines interact with the environment have seldom been specifically studied. These range from historical constructs such as sundials, wind towers, and water screws, to contemporary tools like rovers, construction and earthwork robots, climate-regulating tools that seed clouds and manipulate weather, digital twins simulating performance, AI-driven ecological simulators, and even materials that act as machines through intrinsic behaviors, such as fungi used for targeted decay to support fabrication processes.

Eco-machina will serve both as a theoretical lens and as a material strategy. Rather than viewing machines as merely mechanical devices, we consider them as landscape or material constructs–embedded in the ground, tailored to specific performances, and shaped by site, climate, and material conditions. The seminar blends theoretical inquiry with hands-on experimentation, emphasizing a bioregional approach–working with locally available materials, ecological processes, and environmental constraints to develop meaningful, responsive interventions.

Throughout the semester, students will critically and creatively engage with precedents. Assignments include an individual investigation of specific environmental machines and a small-group project that develops and prototypes a performative, materially intelligent construct in response to a selected environmental condition. Central to our inquiry this semester will be the idea of material mechanisms: tools that work through material properties–for example, harnessing swelling, shrinking, bending, decay, or conductivity to perform environmental work. Possible projects might include, for example, erosion-control structures that support microhabitats in arid zones; damming constructs for filtering water to encourage habitat restoration, such as beaver re-wilding; or bio-habitats tailored to the needs of specific species.
 

The Designer’s Dilemma: Different Design Intelligences and Their Applications

This seminar approaches accessibility through a formal lens–examining architectural form as it operates on the threshold of human abilities. Moving beyond prescriptive standards and the notions of acceptable minimums or generous maximums, the seminar aims to expand the understanding of human abilities and their range, while critically investigating the origins and methods through which accessibility standards have been developed.

From these two analytical trajectories, the seminar seeks to map out latent formal projects–a series of case studies developed by students–that connect the disciplinary interests of architecture with the objectives of accessibility.

It explores the reciprocal relationship between form and its receiving senses, and how each threshold condition affects the legibility of the other. Ultimately, the seminar asks: How can we critically engage with and appreciate the unexplored formal projects that emerge and operate at the threshold–the moment when one of our senses reaches its limit?