Urban Form: Transition as Condition

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.

Urban Form: Transition as Condition 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 cultures and geographies.

These propositions will be engaged in the seminar through readings and class discussions, and individual research projects. In the first half 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-socialist, post-communist, and post-modern formations. These transitional categories are framed in relation to historically-based urban paradigms that posit a relationship between social, political, and economic processes and systems (industrial, Fordist, socialist, communist, modern) 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 conditions. 

In the second half 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 (due in early May) and will be presented in class towards the end of the semester.

Requirements/Assignments: Aside from completing the assigned reading and active participation in class discussions, students will be required to submit reading responses [posted to the course canvas site] in preparation for class discussions of assigned texts and the issues they raise. In addition, a final research project with a written and visual component is required of each student.

Please note that this course is now scheduled on Thursdays from 10 AM to 1 PM.

Design Anthropology: Objects, Landscapes, Cities (with FAS)

In recent years, there has been a movement in anthropology toward a focus on objects, while design and planning have been moving toward the understanding of objects as part of a greater social, political, and cultural milieu. This seminar explores their common ethnographic ground.
 
In spring 2020, the Design Anthropology course will focus on Afro-Brazilian sacred groves, terreiros, in Salvador da Bahia, the fourth largest city in Brazil. Terreiros can be understood as a combination of urban farm and monastery where energies of nature / orishas / deities associated with Afro-Brazilian religions are cultivated through combinations of plants and sacred leaves combined with animal sacrifice and religious rituals. In these spaces, Afro-diasporic memories, knowledge and deities are celebrated. 

Terreiros are plentiful in Brazilian cities such as Salvador which is commonly referred to as “the Black Rome,” because of its hilly topography, the number of churches, and the fusion of African religions that enslaved populations brought to the new world. There are officially about 1,300 terreiros in Salvador, although some researchers maintain that this figure is closer to 2,000. They have very particular internal arrangements—and they are among the last remaining green spaces in an increasingly dense city.

Fieldwork
Eight students will visit Salvador over Spring Recess (March 13–22) and, working in pairs, document the physical and social spaces. GSD students will be selected through the limited enrolment lottery. FAS students will be selected through a short essay due immediately after the first class session. The remaining twelve students who do not travel will conduct their research through secondary sources. There are no prerequisites. Knowledge of Portuguese would be helpful but is not required.

Assignments
Students are expected to engage in two main projects over the course of the semester. The first is the fieldwork either in person or using secondary sources. The class periods leading up to the fieldwork will prepare students—methodologically, ethnographically, and theoretically—for this exercise. After spring recess, all students will share in the results of the collaborative fieldwork to interpret it and produce visualizations of the physical space and lived experience. This first assignment will prepare students to complete the second main project of the course: a design proposal capturing their thinking on design anthropology and the future of the terreiros.

Learning objectives
Where possible, the synergy between anthropologists and designers will be cultivated to maximize exchange between disciplines. The seminar provides students with training in ethnographic methods which can be applied in other academic and professional projects. On completion of the course, students should be prepared for conducting their own ethnographic fieldwork projects, either alone or collectively. During the semester, students will:
1. Apply fieldwork as a bridge between design and anthropology;
2. Develop theoretical positions on landscape arising from fieldwork;
3. Identify non-written forms of note taking;
4. Experiment with visualizing social phenomena and the lived experiences of spaces; 
5. Analyze collective ethnographic data;
6. Imagine and recommend design and policy propositions informed by fieldwork.

Discourse and Methods II

This seminar serves as an introduction to prevalent critical approaches and methodologies in the history and theory of the design disciplines.  The focus will be on recent developments in scholarship, in an attempt to ascertain how we write now. Just as “late work,” belatedness, or more generally, ripeness, have all served as critical and interpretive categories, we will take up new approaches to see where they lead and where emphasis has recently been directed. The aspect of temporal terminology of recentness is informed in part by Juan Pablo Bonta’s Architecture and Its Interpretation: A Study of Expressive Systems in Architecture (1979), where he examined how fixed notions (“canons”) settle into place. “The process of interpretation comprises,” Bonta writes, “the passage from blindness to pre-canonical responses, then the canonical interpretation and its dissemination, and finally silence and oblivion.” Our (in)attention is an instrument for modulating oblivion, casting its bounds in bibliographic space and time. We will deploy it well and wisely as we consider recent performances of interpretation as signs of things to come, namely the future shape of the field to which this seminar is an introduction. This is a highly specialized exercise. Again, in the words of Bonta, “Canons account for the bulk of people’s daily reactions to architecture. Identifying a canon takes less time than producing a pre-canonical interpretation.” As will be examined in our weekly seminars, with recent texts we are still in early days, before the onerous bulk of settled interpretation outweighs other possibilities of thinking.

The class is based on close readings and critical discussions. Readings include fundamental texts in art history, visual theory, media studies, and investigations of material culture. As much as possible, discussions will revolve around objects and cases deriving from the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, and the study of cities.

Prerequisites: This course is normally open only to Ph.D. students in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning and Design. Other GSD and Harvard Ph.D. students may enroll with the instructor’s permission. Students interested in taking the course should submit by email to the instructor a short account of why they want to take the course, a copy of their resume including relevant background courses, and a short writing sample. If admitted to the course, students will be responsible for attending all classes and doing the assigned papers and presentations.

Discourse and Research Methods

Research conducted in the Doctor of Design Program (DDes) at the GSD spans a broad range of topics and areas of investigation that not only represent the disciplines of the three departments at the GSD, but expand into domains such as art, culture, science, engineering or sociology, to just name a few.

GSD 9691 ‘Discourses and Methods’ is a required course for first year DDes students. It involves a close collaboration with the primary advisors, and for that reason the course is only open to DDes students. There are two primary learning goals:

All students will work on their own research design and, as the outcome of the course, produce a draft prospectus in written and in presentation format by the end of the semester. The overall goal is to provide all students a broad foundation in terms of discourses and methods, and contribute to preparing them for leadership roles in the academy or in other areas of society.

Methods of Research in Art and Design: A Workshop-tutorial

This workshop focuses on the exploration, elaboration, and development of students’ research and experimentation in projects that intersect the fields of art and design.

In order to inspire, inform, and support the advancement of students’ art and design projects, as well as expand their research interests, this course will offer a systematic review of their work in progress and include presentations and discussions about relevant readings, research, and projects.

Some of the sessions will be conducted with the participation of guest critics, or enhanced by individual and small group tutorials scheduled during or between regular class meetings.

The visits to sites, events, institutions, and organizations relevant to students’ research and projects will become an important supplement to the regular class meetings.

For MDes, as well as for design studio students, the course may also function as a supportive laboratory and discussion forum as they work towards their Qualifying Papers, Final Projects, or Thesis.

This course is open to all GSD programs and MDes concentrations, but Art Design and the Public Domain students are especially welcome and encouraged to join.

 

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. 

Prerequisites: None.

Visionary Architecture

This seminar will take a selective approach to French Visionary Architecture in the late 18th century. We will focus on some of the significant motifs, themes, and conceptions of architecture that course their way through the works of Étienne-Louis Boullee (1728–1799), Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736–1806), and Jean-Jacques Lequeu (1757–1826), among others. Our starting point will be Emil Kaufmann’s important study, published in 1952, which put these so-called revolutionary architects on the map and posited the Enlightenment as the crucial starting point for understanding modernism in architecture. We will consider such issues as the role played by drawing for presenting largely unbuilt structures, the impact of theorists such as Marc-Antoine Laugier, the relation of architectural form to philosophical categories such as Nature and the Sublime, the emergence of concepts such as architecture parlante, and the dreamed rapport between utopia and the organized city. Readings include the architects in question as well as excerpts from period texts (Burke, Durand, Kant, Laugier, Mercier, Morelly, Rousseau, and the Marquis de Sade) and modern scholarship (Braham, Etlin, Gay, Herrmann, Pérouse de Montclos, Picon, Rosenau, Vidler, and Vogt). 

Course format:

Final grade based on class participation, short written responses to readings, oral presentation, and a research paper. 

Prerequisites: None. 

Constructing Visual Narratives of Place

The seminar explores the representation of identity and memory in the city and its territory. The case study is Boston in its large surrounding area, the so-called Greater Boston, whose memory and identity are directly connected to the perception of its inhabitants and visitors. Such memory and the history that has characterized it since 1960—the year in which The Image of the City by Kevin Lynch was published—has influenced and conditioned the way we look at cities all over the world, the way we perceive those cities’ expansion, and how we acknowledge their new horizons.

The course aims to use this memory and identity to make visible not only the city of Boston but also the larger scale of the Greater Boston metropolitan area.

The complexity of this territory and its imageability is still something that requires deep research and interpretation. The seminar will especially consider the emerging topics of climate change adaptation, sea level rise, and their implications for the displacement of individuals and communities across physical, social, and political levels.

The observation of this area is based on two principles. The first is to define the field of survey, starting from the geographic systems and the big environmental area. The other is to have a richer and more complex picture of the inhabitants of this territory and to focus more on their collective memory and identity.

The final goal of this research and work is twofold: first, we will visually define the public image of the city on its larger scale. Second, we will explore possible future scenarios for Greater Boston, starting from the observation of the present conditions, predictions, and projections of climate change. The course intends to provide tools of observation, reading, and interpretation of the territory and it has the will to communicate stories about different visions of this metropolitan area in a more narrative way. The students will use a variety of media: mapping, drawing, collaging, shooting, and storyboarding.

The work will be divided into three sections:

1. The Big Map: Postcards by Greater Boston.
2. Short movies: The life of Greater Boston.
3. Storyboards: A new narrative for possible future scenarios in the Greater Boston area.

 

Integrated Design & Planning for Climate Change

This advanced research seminar in Miami-Dade County, Florida, is thematically focused within the integrated practices associated with designing and planning for climate change at an urban and regional scale. The seminar will geographically focus on urban to exurban communities—running east-west along Calle Ocho from Brickell Avenue in the City of Miami to the Tamiami Trail in the unincorporated community of Tamiami. The seminar will seek to explore the various economic and planning conventions that have paradoxically created a built environment that on one hand supports a majority of the county’s population, yet on the other hand is otherwise defined by high exposure to surface flooding, traffic-clogged streets, and an increasingly unaffordable housing stock for lower- to middle-income populations.

The seminar seeks to challenge and explore:

1. Metrics of urban service delivery;

2. Synergistic land use and housing production models in rapidly densifying districts;

3. Processes for effective and fair managed retreat;

4. Strategic obsolescence of infrastructure;

5 Novel models for strategic economic development of workforces and their associated workplaces; and

6. The designed adaptive capacity of architecture.

Course format:

Within the context of accelerated climatic, environmental, and social change, students will be required to independently select and develop a research agenda that demonstrates a command of the associated disciplinary literature framing the inquiry. In addition, each student will be required to develop analytical framework(s) that demonstrate the student’s competence for not only understanding the problem(s) but also utilizing such frameworks for practically engaging locally defined problems and stakeholders. In partnership with local stakeholders, students will travel to Miami to conduct field work to support their research. The seminar will culminate in the production of a project (e.g., memorandum, multimedia, etc.) that memorializes the analytical outcomes as well as a normative position for advancing future policy, planning, and design decisions.

Evaluation:

Students are evaluated on one survey presentation and the final research memorandum/media. Each student is required to lead discussions on relevant literature/data shaping their research as well as periodic updates concerning their research progress. Students are encouraged to utilize the seminar to ground complementary existing research for ongoing theses and dissertations.
 

Travel Note:

With the generous support of the Knight Foundation, some students in this seminar will travel to Miami to conduct field work and engaged local stakeholders. The enrollment for the seminar is limited to 20, and 8 of those students will be selected to travel to Miami, FL. The 20 students will be selected via the limited enrollment course lottery. The first 8 students on the list will be selected for the traveling spots, with students waitlisted for travel thereafter. Students enrolled in the option studio 1304: Adapting Miami – Housing on the Transect  are encouraged to take this seminar in conjunction with the studio, but must select the course first in the limited enrollment course lottery in order to be considered for enrollment. These studio students will only travel on the studio portion of the trip. The 8 students selected to take part in the trip will be term-billed $100 and travel September 25 – September 27. Students may travel in only one course or studio in a given term and should refer to traveling seminar policies distributed via email. As part of this initiative, students may have the opportunity to continue the research developed in this seminar beyond the end of the term.

The enrollment for the seminar is limited to 20, and 8 of those students will be selected to travel to Miami, FL. The 20 students will be selected via the limited enrollment course lottery. The first 8 students on the list will be selected for the traveling spots, with students waitlisted for travel thereafter. Students enrolled in the option studio 1304: Adapting Miami – Housing on the Transect  are encouraged to take this seminar in conjunction with the studio, but must select the course first in the limited enrollment course lottery in order to be considered for enrollment. These studio students will only travel on the studio portion of the trip. The 8 students selected to take part in the trip will be term-billed $100 and travel September 25 – September 27. Students may travel in only one course or studio in a given term and should refer to traveling seminar policies distributed via email.

Thing Power in the Arles Region: from Assemblages to Alchemy in the Camargue

Jane Bennett borrows Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of assemblages to argue that humans are not the sole actors in shaping the world. Instead, always-becoming assemblages that include human and nonhuman beings, materials, and forces produce events that form our experience and, she argues, ought to shape our politics. How can these ideas help reimagine the Arles region of southern France, a region under continuous transformation for several millennia and now under social and environmental strain? 

In this seminar, we will examine the assemblages acting on the Camargue, the marshy delta of the Rhone river where Arles meets the sea. Here, humans have, for millennia, grappled with both river and sea to make them better suited for civilization. The received image of this Mediterranean Eden—lavender fields, bustling regional markets, Van Gogh’s vibrating landscapes—belies the centuries of tension between human intervention and the timeless forces and flows that first shaped the area. These interventions are emblematic of global human-caused disruption on the scale of a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene makes urgent the need to reconceptualize human relations with nonhumans. With the Camargue as our research site, we will deploy Bennett’s and others’ “thing theories,” which emphasize the capacity of inanimate matter to act on the world. As the warming climate affects local seasonal patterns of, for example, rice growing, bird migration, or sea salt production, we will identify new hurdles and opportunities to combine human ingenuity with the predisposition of nonhuman forces. 

The course builds from a regional atlas of Arles produced in last year’s seminar, which traced the movements of assemblages from deep geological time to the present. We will study layered vibrations of the Camargue: its Alpine rivers and their channelization, animal habitats, and relationship to Arles, to envision ecological and sociopolitical possibilities. The outcome of the seminar will be an atlas of collisions between existing cross sections and potential futures of the Camargue that will suggest an expanded political agenda. By rearranging familiar human and nonhuman forces in transformative ways, we will aim for alchemical reactions for the region. 

Travel note:

The enrollment for the seminar is limited to 20, and 8 of those students will be selected to travel to Arles, France. The 20 students will be selected via the limited enrollment course lottery. 8 students will be selected for the traveling spots, with students waitlisted for travel spots thereafter. Students enrolled in the option studio 1406: FALLOWSCAPES, Territorial Reconfiguration Strategies for Arles, France are encouraged to take this seminar in conjunction with the studio, but must select the course first in the limited enrollment course lottery in order to be considered for enrollment. The 8 students selected to take part in the trip will be term-billed $300 and travel September 20 – September 28. Students may travel in only one course or studio in a given term and should refer to traveling seminar policies distributed via email.