Courses
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First Semester Core Urban Planning Studio
David Gamble, Leigh Graham, Anne-Marie Lubeneau, Pallavi Mande, Deborah Morris, Ann Forsyth, Ana Gelabert-Sanchez, Lourdes Germán, Purnima Kapur, Lindsay Woodson, Jeana Dunlap
First Semester Core Urban Planning Studio introduces students to the fundamental knowledge and technical skills used by urban planners to research, analyze, create and implement…
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Elements of Urban Design
Peter Rowe, Stephen Gray, Yun Fu, Alex Yuen, Rahul Mehrotra, Michael Manfredi, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, Mark Heller
Elements of Urban Design is the advanced core studio for the post-professional Urban Design program. The studio introduces critical concepts, strategies, and technical skills associated…
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Extending and mending Thamesmead: re-envisioning the town of tomorrow, today
It was a good place to be as a kid. There was so much nature and wide open space. In the spring there would be…
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Highways Revisited
The U.S. Interstate Highway System has been lauded as one of the greatest public works projects in human history. Encompassing nearly fifty thousand miles of…
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History, Boundaries and the Future – Conservation and Infill in Boston’s Chinatown
Boston is fortunate to have large, intact, precincts of fine scaled historic fabric whose character and conservation is carefully monitored through established regulatory processes. However,…
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Great Migration and Memorial Highway: Culture Heritage as Inspiration in New Rochelle
Long perceived as a bedroom community of New York City, New Rochelle is a place unique in colonial New York as being settled by a…
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Planning a Piece of a City, The Architectural Form of the Neighborhood
Contemporary cities generally grow in an amorphous and often mono functional way, generating peripheries that do not contribute to social life and identity. The latter…
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Representation for Planners
Representation for Planners helps those who are not trained to think and draw spatially how to do so. The half semester course runs in parallel to…
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Spatial Analysis
Planners today have access to unprecedented amounts of data on the built environment and the people who use it. These data come from a wide…
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Drawing for Designers: Techniques of Expression, Articulation, and Representation
The course is intended as a creative drawing laboratory for designers and an expressive, playful supplement to computer-based labor. This course will…
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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…
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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…
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Migration in Latin-America: Imagining Flux, Rapid Response and Reversibility
Today’s fast-paced, global flow of people and goods is challenging the idea that the city should be an entity that aspires to…
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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…
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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…
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The Sociological Imagination: Conceptual Foundations for the Urban Planning and Design Professions
What does it mean to plan and design for people? In what ways are built environments and social relationships shaped by one another? And how…
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Real Estate Finance and Development
Richard Peiser, David Hamilton
This course teaches the fundamentals of real estate finance and development. Lectures and case studies introduce students to the full range of…
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Land Use and Environmental Law
As a scarce and necessary resource, land triggers competition and conflict over its possession and use. For privately owned land, the market manages much of…
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Cities by Design
Peter Rowe, Rahul Mehrotra, Eve Blau, Joan Busquets, Farès el-Dahdah, Alex Krieger, Antoine Picon, Yun Fu
Cities by Design is concerned with the in-depth longitudinal examination of urban conditions in and among selected cities in the world. The…
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Field Studies in Real Estate, Urban Planning and Design
Social Impact Investing and ESG in downtown Bellevue, WA and a Park-centric redevelopment of demolished Dallas shopping mall and adjoining properties This…
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Equitable Development and Housing Policy in Urban Settings (at HKS)
An introduction to policymaking in American cities, focusing on economic, demographic, institutional, and political settings. It examines inclusive and equitable economic development and job growth…
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Analytic Methods of Urban Planning: Quantitative
This course introduces students to quantitative analysis and research methods for urban planning. The course begins with an examination of how quantitative methods fit within…
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Analytic Methods of Urban Planning: Qualitative
How can planners understand places in a rich, meaningful, and yet systematic way? This module examines how qualitative approaches can be used…
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Housing and Urbanization in the United States
Jennifer Molinsky, James Stockard
This course examines housing as both an individual concern and an object of policy and planning. It is intended to provide those…
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Contemporary Developing Countries: Entrepreneurial Solutions to Intractable Problems (at FAS)
Tarun Khanna, Satchit Balsari, Krzysztof Gajos, Doris Sommer, Rahul Mehrotra
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…
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Urban Ethnographies
Planners’ understanding of social process and cultural values is often woefully inadequate, and their thinking is dominated by a “one-size-fits-all” approach and…
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Mapping the Political Economy of Space
There is no such thing as neutral space. Topography and soil history, land use and tenure chronicle, housing demands and construction costs,…
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Making State and Local Government Work (at HKS)
This course will focus on how making policy innovations and change can have the impact desired when implemented in a state or local government context.
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Reimagining social infrastructure and collective futures
Design tools and spatial approaches can play a vital role in reimagining a twenty-first century social infrastructure—the underlying structures that sustain social life, including spaces…
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Land Policy and Planning for Equitable and Fiscally Healthy Communities
The course highlights the role land policy and land-based financing play in the development of equitable and fiscally healthy communities in developed and developing countries.
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The Theory and Practice of Sustainable Urban Development: SDG #11 and Beyond
This project-based course seeks a critical yet constructive approach to the emerging urban agenda formulated within the UN’s 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The inclusion…
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Transportation Economics and Finance
We can define transportation infrastructure to comprise all the physical objects that provide mobility: including everything from trains, highways, and ports to sneakers, trails, and…
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Urban Economics for Planners and Policymakers
This course introduces economic frameworks for understanding both the benefits and challenges of living in, working in and managing cities. Urban economics incorporates the concept…
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Confronting Climate Change: A Foundation in Science, Technology and Policy
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…
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Real Estate Private Equity [M1]
Real Estate Private Equity explores, in depth, the analysis, decision-making and challenges private equity investors face when: 1. making and structuring highly…
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Real Estate Private Equity [M2]
Real Estate Private Equity explores, in depth, the analysis, decision-making and challenges private equity investors face when: 1. making and structuring highly leveraged investments, 2.
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Real Estate and City Making in China
Real estate has increasingly become a compelling force in the process of city making, one uniquely capable of leading and guiding multiple steps in the…
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Independent Study by Candidates for Master’s Degrees
George Thomas, Oana Stanescu, Andrew Witt, Eve Blau, Joan Busquets, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, Diane Davis, Martin Bechthold, Sharon Johnston, Iman Fayyad, Malkit Shoshan, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Carole Voulgaris, Susan Snyder, Jon Lott
Students may take a maximum of 8 units with different GSD instructors in this course series. 9201 must be taken for either 2, or 4…
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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…
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Independent Study by Candidates for Doctoral Degrees
9502 must be taken for either 2 or 4 units. Under faculty guidance, the student conducts an independent reading program and formulates a thesis proposal.
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Thesis in Satisfaction of Degree Doctor of Design
Martin Bechthold, Ann Forsyth, Rahul Mehrotra, Peter Rowe, Charles Waldheim
Thesis in Satisfaction of the degree Doctor of Design.
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Proseminar in PUBLICS: Of the Public. In the Public. By the Public
Public, as a noun or adjective, is not confined to a single discipline, practice, narrative or theory. It is instead, a complicated construct that can…
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Proseminar in MEDIUMS: On Making Culture, Technology, and Art
In this proseminar, we will take a critical look at the current and emerging landscape of design technologies and technologically driven design. We will examine…
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Proseminar in NARRATIVES: Word and Image as Narrative Structure
In our Proseminar, we will grapple with a selection of critical discussions on word and image as these have been formulated in aesthetic philosophy, literary…
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Proseminar in ECOLOGIES: Interrelated, In-between, Dynamic
Our aim in the proseminar is to explore the inherent inventedness of ecology as a field of inquiry, its distinctly relational nature, and the potential…