Courses
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Community Development: History, Theory, and Imaginative Practice
Community development is a heterogeneous and contested field of planning thought and practice. The profession has generally prioritized people and places that…
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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…
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Developing for Social Impact
This field studies course will use a combination of readings, lectures, class discussion and a focused development exercise for a Boston site to explore…
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Demographics and Population Processes
Many of the important challenges that our communities face today, from the persistent racial and ethnic disparities and human rights violations, to…
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Discourse and Methods I
This course is open only to Ph.D. students in Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning and Design (Ph.D. students from other departments may participate with…
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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…
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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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Experimental Infrastructures
Infrastructure is an encompassing term that can refer to anything from railroad ties to social media to ecosystems, and one which has…
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The Spatial Politics of Land: A Comparative Perspective
This course focuses on the deeply contested and political processes of land-use planning, i.e. of allocating land amongst different, often competing uses,…
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Public Space
In a digital age, does physical public space matter? Tahrir Square, Zuccotti Park, Madrid Rio, and the High Line argue yes, with ambitions ranging from…
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Applied Urban Analytics
The course will investigate a number of qualitative and quantitative methods to measure and analyze urban spatial problems relevant to contemporary urban…
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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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Multiple Miamis Project-based Course: Infrastructure, Affordability, Identity + the Public
The Miami project-based course will explore how urban planning and design can promote affordable housing, retail, and services, public mobility and access,…
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Preparation for Independent Thesis Proposal for MUP, MAUD, or MLAUD
This seminar is intended to provide the theoretical and methodological foundation for completing a graduate thesis in the Department of Urban Planning and Design. By…
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Interdisciplinary Art and Design Practices
The Interdisciplinary Art Practices seminar investigates the exploratory character of art and design work in the interdisciplinary modalities of the contemporary culture. In the present…
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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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Advanced Seminar in City Form: Future of Streets
The Advanced Seminar in City Form invites a group of students to research and discuss themes about the form of cities in…
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Urban Grids: Open form for City Design-2
Framework:Within a larger research scope on “Revisiting the urban grids in the XXI century”, this seminar will focus on the investigation…
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Modern Architecture and Urbanism in China
Modernizing influences, largely from the hands of foreign powers, first forcefully entered China in the aftermath of the Opium War and signing…
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Urbanization and International Development
This course brings together two fields of specialization that are central to planners keen on working in international contexts: i) the field…
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Towns and Settlements in Metropolitan Regions
As cities expand into metropolitan regions they inevitably push up against, produce, otherwise engage, and sometimes engulf already established settlements on their…
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Environment, Economics, and Enterprise
Holly Samuelson, Frank Apeseche
How can one optimize the benefits of environmental or social sustainability while generating a higher return on investment in buildings? Where are…
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Energetics of Urbanization
Two significant discourses on energy and urbanization are converging, with increasingly parallel questions and concerns. First, a discourse on extended urbanization…
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Community Development: Past, Present, and Future
This course provides a critical overview of conceptual and applied approaches to community development. It examines evolving patterns and drivers of urban…
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Housing Tropes* and the Role of Design
This course will focus on conceptualizing the role of design and the agency of architecture and planning in the process of housing…
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Discourse and Methods II
K. Michael Hays, Catherine Ingraham
This seminar is designed as an introduction to some of the major critical approaches and methodologies that have shaped the history and theory of the…
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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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Healthy Places
The connections between health, well-being, and place are a complex. This class focuses on four topics that will be important in coming…
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The Spatial Politics of Land: A Comparative Perspective
This course focuses on the deeply contested and political processes of land-use planning, i.e. of allocating land amongst different, often competing uses,…
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The Gentrification Debates: Perceptions and Realities of Neighborhood Change
Gentrification and the real and perceived impacts that neighborhood change has on longtime local residents as well as new dwellers, is complicated…
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Public Space
In a digital age, does physical public space matter? Tahrir Square, Zuccotti Park, Madrid Rio, and the High Line argue yes, with ambitions ranging from…
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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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Emergent Urbanism: Planning and Design Visions for the city of Hermosillo, Mexico
This project-based class focuses on the planning and design of sustainable strategies for cities in the developing world, using the city of…
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Preparation for Independent Thesis Proposal for MUP, MAUD, or MLAUD
This seminar is intended to provide the theoretical and methodological foundation for completing a graduate thesis in the Department of Urban Planning and Design. By…
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Doctoral Program Proseminar
This pro-seminar is one way of fulfilling a requirement for successful completion of the Doctor of Design program. Primarily, it will focus on various thematic…
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Type and the Idea of the City
Open to all students, the seminars in this course will compliment Option Studio 1504: Type, City, Ecology. It will equip students with…
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Urban Grids: Open form for City Design-2
Framework:Within a larger research scope on “Revisiting the urban grids in the XXI century”, this seminar will focus on the investigation…
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Representing the collective: constructing meaning, legitimizing the discipline
How are the representations and discoures of collectivity organized? From the City Beautiful to Broadacre City, from Camillo Sitte to the Metabolists,…
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Urbanization and International Development
This course interrogates the relationship between urbanization and development. One of the main objectives of the course is to move beyond seeing…
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Design for the Just City
To reside in an American city means to always be in pursuit of the values or inalienable rights that embody the Just…
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Towns and Settlements in Metropolitan Regions
As cities expand into metropolitan regions they inevitably push up against, produce, otherwise engage, and sometimes engulf already established settlements on their…
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Global Perspectives on Shelter Insecurity and Displacement
This course examines the drivers of, and responses to, global shelter insecurity and displacement. It addresses these issues in both the Global…
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Urban Infrastructure, Environment, and Sustainability
Urban infrastructures are socio-technical systems of facilities and services (i.e. energy, telecommunications, transportation, water, waste management, food distribution, housing) vital to the…
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Environment, Economics, and Enterprise
Holly Samuelson, Frank Apeseche
How can one optimize the benefits of environmental or social sustainability while generating a higher return on investment in buildings? Where are…
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Creating Real Estate Ventures: a Legal Perspective
The course will examine how a commercial real estate deal is put together to move a project from conception to completion. The…
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SURPLUS HOUSING: From Project to Model
Housing as typology is one of the richest representations of a city’s history and evolution of culture. The gradual collection of dwellings…
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Discourse and Methods I
This course is open only to Ph.D. students in Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning and Design (Ph.D. students from other departments may participate with…
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Interdisciplinary Art and Design Practices
The Interdisciplinary Art Practices seminar investigates the exploratory character of art and design work in the interdisciplinary modalities of the contemporary culture. In the present…
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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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Advanced Seminar in City Form: Designing for Multimodal Mobility
Advanced Seminar in City Form — Designing for Multimodal Mobility — invites a group of students to research and discuss themes about…