Quo Vadis, Addis?
The design studio Quo Vadis, Addis? addresses the question of how to integrate manufacturing in the textile and garment sector within the socio-spatial fabric of Ethiopia’s capital city Addis Ababa. The objective is to challenge the predominant tendency in the country to treat workplaces as monofunctional enclaves isolated from their context.
Ethiopia is currently considered the new frontier of the garment industry, with clothes “Made in Ethiopia” being the cheapest to produce globally. In fact, large-scale factories have been built all over the country, particularly around Addis Ababa, producing for foreign markets and global brands, while exploiting the young labor force seeking to make a living.
Taking its clues from a long tradition of craftsmanship in textile-making and that of artisans being organized in small-scale co-operatives, the studio sets out to explore modern-day alternatives to current low-wage, precarious production arrangements. In seeking to identify strategies for empowering people via locally embedded forms of economic development, solutions are sought for incorporating the labor force and the workplace into the civic realm – socially and spatially.
The studio asks how design could improve the quality of the habitats that inhabitants collectively inhabit – habitats that are equitable, sustainable, and spatially sound.
Tuesday 2:00 – 6:00, with additional desk crits during the week at mutually agreeable times.
Instruction will be in person.
LATIN AMERICA IN TRANSITION: Imagining Infrastructures for Climatic Migration
The world is facing a moment of growing climate and migratory uncertainty. The accelerated intensity of natural and humanitarian disasters is giving rise to new and more complex forms of vulnerability. Migration has acquired an unprecedented dimension, while the infrastructure that will respond to climate displacements remains unanswered. Before the pandemic, projections indicated that the share of migrants in the total global population would increase from 2.8% in 2010 (190 million people) to 3.5% in 2050 (334 million people)—today, projections are higher and anticipated to grow. Furthermore, predictions signal that in following decades, there will be migratory displacements of up to 200 million additional people because of environmental factors. Rising sea levels, changes in rainfall distribution patterns and in ocean chemistry will strongly affect coastal cities, where 77% of the at-risk global population resides. In the years to come, a more vulnerable migration landscape will increase the demand for rapid response settlements, which poses a new set of challenges for destination cities.
These unprecedented projections have casted doubts over the true capacity of cities to absorb the impact of future climate migrants. Therefore, a reframed design imagination is needed to prepare cities for the consequences of climate change, and especially for cities to absorb human displacement. In response to this challenge, this studio will be a space to speculate about the required urban infrastructure needed to strengthen the capacity of destinations to take in climate migrant flows. We will focus on the case of Chile, planning and designing infrastructure for future extreme climate migration, testing potential solutions, and framing urban interventions in the most vulnerable contexts. The group will reflect on how to, on the one hand, anticipate climate migration, and on the other, adapt the urban fabric taken up by those most heavily exposed to climate risk.
The studio will be divided into four modules. The first module, “Anticipating Scenarios”, will focus on developing climate scenarios for 2050 and methodologies for visual representation, forcing us to speculate about extreme weather conditions contextualizing the landscapes of intervention. The second module, “Understanding Sites”, will focus on understanding places of operation; we will use the 2021 cadaster of informal settlements and its projections to frame the intervention scenarios. As a way to design for the effects of climate change in diverse geographies, sites will be located in 4 geographically distinct cities that have faced massive migration fluxes in the last years and which are projected to intensify: from the northern Antofagasta region to the central Metropolitan region. The third module, “Defining Strategies”, will focus on defining domains of engagement and the scale of the design interventions. Finally, the module “Designing Transitions” will focus on defining and developing proposals at various scales. We will test innovative strategies at the intersection of architecture, landscape, urban planning, and design.
The studio is open to students across all departments and programs. As a collective project, the work will be showcased in an exhibition called Latin America in Transition. We will also collaborate with DRCLAS Art, Film, and Culture Program from the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies in a parallel symposium that will inform the work of the class, gathering experts on the topic across Harvard University and Latin America more broadly.
This course will meet weekly on Thursdays and Fridays.
Felipe Vera will be in residence on the following days: January 27, 28; February 10, 11; March 3, 4, 31; April 1, 14, 15, 28, 29; and for final reviews.
Soledad Patiño will be in residence on the following days: February 17, 18; March 24, 25; April 7, 8; and for final reviews.
Class will be held via Zoom on all other Thursdays and Fridays.
Transversal Grounds: Engaging Infrastructure, Landscape and Heritage for Lima’s New Urban Commons
In developing countries, heritage sites in urban settings often collide with urban growth and economic expansion. Lima has more than 385 archeological sites within its urban tissue, the capital city with the most pre-Columbian heritage sites in the Americas. However, their sacred significance and historical value have been lost, neglected, and enclosed by walls; these endangered sites appear as urban black holes, gravitationally attracting the encroaching urbanization.
What we see today as huge mounds of earth and dust were part of a unique diffuse city built over an articulated system of canals, agroforestry, ceremonial centers and settlements, connected by an efficient road network, which composed a built sacred landscape articulated to ecological and social processes. Today, these places, called Huacas, are evenly distributed in the megacity: they embedded in a huge catalog of urban complexity and they can potentially trigger systemic changes in the city: a perfect laboratory to explore design issues where heritage is an opportunity for reimagining the future of an entire city.
How can these ancient sacred sites be reimagined as woven into the fabric of community life, preserving their legacy while reducing Lima’s public and green space deficit and mitigate Lima’s critical food and water insecurity?
The Maranga complex is one of the biggest heritage sites, located in what is now the geometric center of the megacity, and a perfect opportunity to investigate how to deal with multi-scalar complexity, blurring boundaries between architecture, landscape, and urban design. The case study research will focus on the transformation of obsolete urban programs like zoos and enclosed urban university campuses with no student housing.
We will learn from the diffuse, ancient underlying city to reinvent the 21st Century commons through innovative, hybrid urban infrastructures, productive landscape and architectural spaces, intensifying city life, and ensuring an urban food hub system in this ever-growing megacity. A field trip to Washington DC is planned to allow to see how food deserts have been created in the US and learn from the people who are fighting them with urban food hub systems. Workshops with students and teachers of the College of Agriculture, Urban Sustainability and Environmental Sciences at the land-grant UDC will take place as part of the studio.
The studio will start right away with design research, complemented by discussions with renown experts about the many issues of the project. We’ll have an immersion in essential topics as Heritage, Housing, ecological infrastructure and Food Hubs through readings and lectures by an environmental economist, a preservation architect, a scientist, a biologist, an NGO leader, a Peruvian leading urban designer and a water infrastructure expert.
Students in the Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Urban Design and Planning programs are welcomed.
This course will meet weekly on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
The instructors will be in residence on the following days: January 24-27; February 22-25; March 21-May 4.
Class will be held via Zoom on all other Tuesdays and Thursdays.
A Moratorium on New Construction
“We need to stop constructing in order to start building.”
— Menna Agha
Back in March 2020, everything stopped. Or so it seemed. Worldwide, construction sites largely kept operating. The pause that offered to question our societal model proposed by philosopher Bruno Latour, touting that “if everything is stopped, everything can be questioned, bent, selected, sorted, interrupted for good or accelerated,” did not happen. Critical questions about the contribution of the building industry to the ongoing environmental and social crisis remained unaddressed. Responsible for 40% of carbon emissions worldwide, construction and the expansionist enterprise of extraction it fuels goes on unabated. Yet we know construction material’s extractive practices (i.e. building materials and all ancillary facilitation technologies) are physically impacting entire regions: micro-climates, water resources, fauna, flora, with gendered and racialized populations most affected. What Donna Haraway calls “the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture” and the commodification of the Earth for the expansion of the built environment are mirrored in today’s global neo-colonial modes of extraction capitalism. Furthermore, global material use is expected to rebound with post-pandemic economic policies, and to double by 2060— a third of this rise attributable to construction. While decarbonizing the industry is an urgent task, a drastic change to building protocols is necessary. Beyond the provocation around the suspension of new building activity, the studio seeks to articulate a radical thinking framework to work out alternatives: What happens if we stop building anew for a moment?
It is easy to argue against what may be perceived as a polemical call: Who is to say what and where should one construct as housing is a human right? A pause should allow for complex questions to be addressed: How to navigate the need for housing versus the destructive practice of construction? How much of the thousands of new units built every year everywhere are accessible to those who need it most—while office and retail space lay vacant? Beyond moral confines and neo-Malthusian indictments, how to discuss sustainability as a contested concept, legacies of degrowth theory, green capitalism and problematic Co2 reductions policies becoming the stuff of riots? (Peter Marcuse) Moreover, how to face the complicit role that design disciplines play in environmental degradation, social injustice, and climate crisis, and challenge the current modus operandi of global construction?
Starting with investigating existing laws as tools to regulate the built environment, we will explore precedent alternatives to building new—from rent control to reuse, before crafting and redacting our own moratoria specific to self-chosen sites. The studio hopes to then test the moratorium in a series of locations globally beyond the build-more diktat, questioning the standard claim of ‘building right,’ predatorial real-estate, high-tech-heavy solutions, and the archetypical assumption that architects must build anew rather than practicing methods of prolonging structures and redistributive modes of ownership and commoning. Moving forward, a design vision for a material future relying on our current built stock emerges.
Airport Urban Districts for a New Age
Rethinking airports in the context of environmental crisis challenges for exploring efficient intermodal transportation nodes as new frontier for developing the future.
The right combination of transportation modes can ensure the high-level accessibility that innovative economy is demanding and reducing the negative impact of unnecessary long-range travelling.
Dynamic capacity of the airports can then produce sustainable Districts where new major urban centralities can be deployed at different scopes.
Studio will explore how these models can be implemented acknowledging different factors that determine the urban form of the airports and its districts, in different cultures and its complementarity role with other high performance mobility systems.
Research will select key paradigmatic real examples from different scopes -international; regional or local- to understand its urban influence. Later, Studio will test few urban design strategies to explore the construction of exciting urban Districts for working, living and new forms of exchange.
Dingliang Yang will serve as Teaching Fellow
Leveraging Boston’s Building Boom to Advance Equity
A transit-oriented development on Dorchester Bay is a case study in creating ties to institutions and diverse neighborhoods on the south side of the city. For the past ten years, Boston/Cambridge area has seen explosive growth due to its global attraction as a center for technology innovation. Development for “meds and eds” (major hospitals and research institutions) is fueling enterprise districts such as Kendall Square, Seaport, and the planned Allston Enterprise campus. The challenges each district faces are to keep them attractive and welcoming for all, provide access for jobs and housing to surrounding communities, and maintain the quality of urban design for which Boston is justifiably admired.
Our site for developing a mix of R+D lab space, housing, retail, and community services is a 20+ acre parcel immediately adjacent to the JFK red line station, where metro, commuter rail, bus, and bikeways all make it extraordinarily accessible. Facing Dorchester Bay and the Harborwalk, the site is part of the Columbia Point penninsula- the home of UMass Boston, and the JFK Library. Responding to issues of resilience and flooding will be key to imagining the potential of this landfill site.
The goal of the studio will be to unlock the potential of this extraordinary site to provide economic opportunity through employment, access to services, new community facilities, and connecting the neighborhoods to the water.
Wild Ways: A Fifth Ecology for Metropolitan Los Angeles
Playing off Reyner Banham’s classic Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, the studio will explore themes of connectivity, resilience and landscape infrastructure under the twin challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss in the Anthropocene. The work will interrogate and explore what a system of landscape infrastructure for connectivity across Southern California’s biodiversity hotspots might look like—in the face of growing urbanization and climate change. Proposals will embrace regional networks of wildlife crossings that are generated from the primary lenses of different endangered species; that layer in humans as both users and audience (on/in the crossings versus driving underneath or over them); and that account for intensifying threats of wildfire. The goal is to invent the basis for a new metropolitan ecology—a mix of culture, geography, environment, and lifestyle (in Banham’s terms)—adapted to a rapidly evolving and warming climate.
The studio will be jointly sponsored by Arc Solutions, “an interdisciplinary partnership working to facilitate new thinking, new methods, new materials and new solutions for wildlife crossing structures” (their words), and the National Wildlife Federation. The work will be used in part to demonstrate to public agencies and organizations across the North American continent the ways in which multifunctional landscape infrastructures can be imagined to re-knit ecosystems and communities in compelling ways.
OTTAWA COUNTY REMADE: Toxic Transformations in the Tri-State Lead and Zinc District, Oklahoma
OTTAWA COUNTY REMADE is the second in a series of design studios based in North-East Oklahoma that explores toxic land regeneration, indigenous ecologies and their combined agency in creating environmental and social equity using critical practices of landscape design and making. The study site is Ottawa County, OK. at the edge of the Ozark Highlands and eastern boundary of the Tallgrass Prairie. This site is the largest and most dangerous polluted landscape of former mining works in the United States, it is part of the Neosho/ Spring River riparian corridor, and is home to tribal and non-tribal communities based around former mining centers including the abandoned ‘ghost towns’ of Picher and Cardin. The land and riparian ecology of the region has been devastated by acid mine drainage, land settlement and waste ‘mountains’ of mining spoil and the riverway systems in the larger County area are compromised by pollution, flooding and continued damming of the Grand Lake O’ the Cherokees to the south.
The intellectual question of the studio is– how does a tribal and non-tribal culture express itself through design in environmental form in a time of devastation, repair, recovery and transformation? The studio will imagine alternative design futures working with the local Quapaw Nation as well as non-tribal communities. A field trip (subject to approval by GSD Administration) will take place where the class will be hosted by tribal leaders and the non-profit LEAD Agency Inc. of Miami, OK.
Working in groups or individually, and importantly with tribal organizations and local experts and researchers, class members will give spatial organization and advance detail design proposals for the transformation of, for example – the mining waste mountains and the intense pollution of local riverways, while reimagining at the same time, the future form of the larger County area with regard to local infrastructure, agriculture, cultural programs and identity. Class members will first investigate a range of superfund sites located on tribal lands and then learn and test out core and advanced techniques of abandoned land reclamation and the indigenous understanding of ecology set within this intense cultural and ecological setting. The studio is open to students in all GSD degree programs.
Below, Above, and Beyond: Abandoned Underground Subway Infrastructures as Urban Form and Experience
This studio aims to propose a near-future scenario for the abandoned underground infrastructures of the subway system of Boston and its vicinity, with a focus on Brattle Tunnel underneath Harvard Square. During the first six weeks, students will look at all of the defunct underground infrastructures owned by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) MBTA to “design” a system in which those decommissioned spaces could operate again, not as a part of the subway network, but with particular themes that would suggest a new type of public space in the era of climate change. Then, in the second half, students will focus on Brattle Tunnel, within their own designed networks.
The Boston and Cambridge subway system is the oldest in the US, and its history is fundamentally related to urban growth and the shaping of the citizens' everyday lives. Since the subway’s first test run between Park St. Station and Harvard Sq. in 1910, “commutability” between Cambridge and its neighboring towns increased, affecting the settlement patterns and housing regulations of the towns. However, the evolution of the city also made some of infrastructures decommissioned, and now there are a number of such spaces underneath very prime urban locations, which invite us to imagine our future leveraged by them. Can we reveal them to operate once again, but this time as a new urban form and experience to help us live better lives in the era of climate change?
In Part 1, each pair of students will work to propose a network with its own theme, such as hydrology, subsoil, new consumption culture, cultural venue, emergency handling, wild life, and climate control. Although the focus will be on these underground spaces, you must clearly aim to find the relation between “the below” and “the above,” and what lies "beyond." The purpose of the Part 1 is to understand the individual abandoned spaces in a holistic view, and to configure a potential system that can provide a new role and value to those spaces. Lectures and workshops with guests will help students create speculative proposals that are also realistic. After the mid-review, students will work individually (or choose to continue to work in pairs) and focus on Brattle Tunnel to revitalize the 430 ft long tunnel in the networks proposed in Part 1. It is crucial to look at the tunnel as part of a holistic physical context that consists of the web of open spaces, rivers, drainage systems, roads, groundwater, soil, subsoil, and air. The genuine charm of the empty tunnel and its spatial implications in relation to the Charles River and other surrounding landscapes will provide students with an opportunity to reimagine the way in which the public occupies and experiences the tight-knit fabric of Harvard Square.
This is an intense design studio. Your accumulated composite body of knowledge, not only from the studios but also from other classes and outside experience, will need to be brought into the design process. The studio must collectively pursue a high level of specificity in its plans and sections. The studio is open to students in all GSD degree programs, although landscape architectural approaches will be asked throughout the semester (i.e., capability of working with various scales, material exploration, vision for public space in the context of Boston/Cambridge, and climate change adaptation).
CANARY IN THE MINE II: Wildfires and Rural Communities in Guinea-Bissau
Indigenous burning practices in mitigating wildfires in Africa are still an overlooked topic in landscape stewardship, food security, and community wellbeing. This gap is particularly true for the rural communities of Guinea-Bissau— known to host large tracks of the African Forest Belt and to expand the West-Africa’s Agricultural Frontier with the evolving cashew nut agri-business. Guinea-Bissau’s dependence on agro-pastoral activities makes it one of the countries in West Africa with the highest vulnerability risk in the context of climatic uncertainty. While increasing the economic stability of many families, the expansion of cash crops and the regulatory frameworks imposed to protect the African Forest Belt outlaws the practice of cultural burning central to the shifting-cultivation traditional methods. These factors have debilitated local food security and have triggered fuel accumulation in the forests and savannahs—leading to the increase of wildfire occurrences in the last decades. The challenges posed by climatic degradation and international protocols on bio-diversity protection and greenhouse gas emission reduction have forced the national government to intensify the exclusion of queimadas (cultural burns) in traditional shifting cultivation and pastoral practices—perceived as environmentally damaging and non-compliant with fire-management policies. Thus, the opposing goals of the rural communities, the government, and conservation institutions result in conflicts with impacts on community stability, cultural sovereignty, and environmental health. Participatory fire co-management seems an emerging strategy adopted by some nations facing similar challenges, however it is still a far objective in Guinea-Bissau’s political ambitions. The CANARY IN THE MINE (II) investigates landscape choreographies and techniques in cooperation with local communities to build adaptive capacity scenarios aiming for sturdier landscape stewardship, food security, and community wellbeing.
This course will meet weekly on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Silvia Benedito will be in residence on the following days: February 15, 17; March 8,10; April 5,7, 28; and for final reviews.
All other class sessions will be held via Zoom on all other Tuesdays and Thursdays.