Landscape Synergies of the new Energies

Faster than we would have ever thought we will and do already experience sustainable forms of energy production, storage, distribution and transport dominating and profoundly transforming all forms of our landscapes: urban, peri-urban, rural, productive, abandoned or not, and even natural, cultural and classified landmarks. The dream of a life without exploiting fossil sources and irreversibly exploiting our geological grounds seems to change from a vision to reality.

But in this rapid transformation conflicts are, of course, inevitable. Nature and monument protection rebel or are just happy to see the new power plants developed far away in the deserts of Arizona, Southern Spain, Morocco, or the Emirates.

The IEA (International Energy Agency) already in 2020 confirmed, that solar energy is now the “cheapest electricity in history”. Should these optimistic news only open future grounds for lucky shareholders and international investors and keep going on with models of profit maximization, or should the new infrastructures of energy production, transport and storage give back not only economic crumbs and some secure jobs to the local communities but help to substantially transform the territorial structures into something new and figure as catalyst for natural restoration, new rural and urban forms of food production and settlements?

With all respect to engineering requirements: why may panels, mirror and CSP elements who now get in a mono functional way implanted in power plans of several square miles size, not be arranged in alternative ways with more consideration of landscape structures (topography, hydrology, potential natural vegetation), maybe in mixed use of agriculture, settlements, services for communities, maybe even considering and getting inspiration from traditional patterns of local land use and local cultural background? What kind of “landscape synergies” can we imagine for the infrastructures of transport and storage? Who will design them? How will we design them?

The studio will face these questions and propose landscape design strategies for a case studies sites: Noor (Ouarzazate, Morocco), the world largest solar power plant. It is in a desert context with specific natural conditions, where also historical cultural traces, different forms of agriculture and settlements can be found nearby.

In a first part, we will understand and record the “engineering requirements” of the sustainable energy production, transport, and storage, and also undergo design research about the historical forms of the relationship between landscape and energy in general and in the specific contexts.

Another task will be the mapping of the relevant landscape issues of the case study site. After this, site investigation will complement the analytical approach with the experience of the real context (natural/technical/cultural/social).

The main challenge of the studio will be to define landscape and/or architectonical projects for the future development of the sites transforming the mono functional technical power plants into lively structures, integrated in a regenerated or transformed landscape that deals with synergetic opportunities of economic, technical, and material resources for different forms of creatures. This can be a large territorial project around the power plants, a network of linear or punctual interventions in the larger area, as well as the gradual mutation of the power plants and the infrastructures themselves. In particular, synergetic opportunities for the nearby local community will be developed.

BANGKOK REMADE

BANGKOK REMADE will advance alternative futures for the capital city of Thailand. The studio subtitled ‘Design to Enhance Social Dignity, Climate Resilience and Inspire the Nation’s Imagination in the Contemporary Thai Landscape’ will engage with environmental engineering, flood control and land equity as a source of pragmatic landscape design ideas and tools to understand and reimagine this delta occupied by industry and dense settlements yet, in part, also derelict, polluted and in climate crisis. In addition, the ambition of the studio is to also inspire through design the Nation’s imagination about this contrary yet vibrant Thai landscape.

The study area is situated in the Chao Phraya River Delta, and is characterized as a flat low-lying plain and forms a vast water holding and dispersion area, which once served as a resource for defense and rice cultivation. A particular studio focus will be the former port facility of Khlong Toei and the broader districts along the main artery of the Chao Phraya.

Class members working individually or in teams will design innovative solutions for existing conditions in Bangkok’s overcrowded districts by the Chao Phraya River using small scale test proposals as ‘acupuncture’ replicable across the natural and built landscape. Students will shape a landscape design language from schematic concepts to specific site details- for water detention and control that will encompass flooding and drought mitigation, brownfield reclamation, the disposal or reuse of municipal waste and the reconstruction or reinvention of landscape infrastructure, informal settlements, land sharing and public space using the themes of ‘equity’ ‘permeability’ and ‘beauty’ within the context and traditions of Bangkok’s natural and built fabric.

A sponsored field trip to Thailand will take place in early February when students will engage with experts on the Chao Phraya and collaborate with local informal settlements and environmental organizations as well as representatives of city leadership. A further visit will take place to NYC in March to participate in the United Nations 2023 International Water Workshop. Final documentation of class projects will be assembled as a document and a traveling exhibition. The studio is open to students in landscape degree programs.

Below, Above, and Beyond: Future of Antwerp’s Mobility and Public Space

This studio aims to project the near-future scenario of Antwerp 's mobility and public space. We will challenge the conventional monofunctionality of urban infrastructure by proposing the interweaving of the under- and aboveground. Two major mobility enhancement projects are currently underway in the city: the ongoing construction of the Oosterweel Link, which will close the incomplete Antwerp ring road (R1), and the planning of A102, which will enhance the city’s overall mobility in a larger European Union (EU) context while diverting as much through-traffic as possible from the city. Although both routes have been planned to run mainly underground, the proportion of underground to aboveground for A102 remains undecided (in connection with the city’s reserved green space network), which provides the studio with a tremendous opportunity to reshape the city’s car-dependent mobility infrastructure toward decarbonization. The studio will examine the four nodes on the planned route of A102 where the underground highway will rise to meet the existing community and public spaces above and will consider how landscape can facilitate a framework for such infrastructural change.

The students will carry out the project in three phases. In the first four weeks of the semester, “Part 1: Context and Imagination,” pairs of students will investigate the site, mainly on and around but not limited to A102, and will examine Antwerp’s status in regard to mobility and public space. Students will be asked to explore the best media to be used throughout the semester to present the imaginative dimension of the topic and sites. When students use sectional thinking and representation as common design and commutative tools to deeply explore the site and problem, they will be asked to find an associated tool to expand their design and imaginatively represent the spatial experience.
 
In “Part 2: On Site,” the studio will visit the site to test the findings of Part 1 and conduct field research.

In the later part of the semester, “Part 3: Landscape as a Framework,” students will first establish the overall distribution of programs along and around the A102 route, with the community and public space as priorities. Next, they will proceed to the site-specific design of one of the four nodes, in which the mobility, subterranean, aboveground, and public space network will work together to enhance the life of the community, with the eventual goal of decarbonizing Antwerp.

This is a parallel studio with the Faculty of Design Sciences at the University of Antwerp (U of A), and the studio will benefit from the dynamic exchange between the two schools. The instructor will meet in person with the class during studio hours unless otherwise indicated. The course is open to all students who are eligible to take an optional studio in spring 2023, but applicants should bear in mind that this is a very design-oriented studio, and students will be expected to communicate through plans, sections, models, and other types of representational media.

CANARY IN THE MINE: De-carbonize, De-climatize, De-colonize rural communities

Canary in the mine is a sequence of Option Studios at the Harvard GSD focused on rural territories addressing communities and landscapes subject to ever-growing vulnerabilities in the context of anthropogenic driven impacts. The new sequence of Canary in Mine will examine designated rural villages in the center of Portugal under the continuous threats of wildfires, desertification, loss of biodiversity and cultural disintegration. Importantly, it will mobilize local latencies and local knowledge for increased resilience through the agency of design pertaining three topics: de-carbonization, de-climatization and de-colonization. In close collaboration with the New European Bauhaus, under the goals established in the European Green Deal, the Option Studio will explore design strategies toward new economic, social, and ecological paradigms. With approximately two-thirds of the country considered “rural,” the symptoms of current wildfires and expanding droughts are a warning and a prospect of what the future holds for Mediterranean landscapes; and, potentially, a springboard for new planning/design principles in today’s challenges.

The WHY questions are, for instance: Why is “rural” considered “rural”? Why are certain landscape features constructed in a particular manner and for which purposes? Why are climate driven crises so extreme in these territories? Why are rural communities disenfranchised? Why has the “rural” been marginalized? And why is important to revisit the “rural”? The HOW questions are: How will climate change impact these hinterlands? How can landscape (soft and hard) mitigate such thermal trends? How did the landscape (as a product of the deep symbiosis) reach the current state? How can the landscape be re-imagined as an infrastructure or medium for increased resiliency in the context of ever-growing wildfires? What new economic possibilities inform resilient forms of acting/forming the rural territory? And finally, how can the communities and their social/productive practices be re-integrated in the formation of the built environment?

Biospheric Urbanism – Changing Climates

Critical Moment
The climate crisis poses the urgent question of how to make our built environment more resilient to the challenging atmospheric changes such as heat islands, rising temperature, intensified rainfall, and longer droughts. Landscape architecture has a long history in using growth and transformation as its agents to better inhabit this planet. This unprecedented crisis represents an opportunity, and equal responsibility, for landscape architecture to radically rethink its field.

A City as a Myriad Microclimates
Cities account for over 70% of global carbon dioxide emissions worldwide, while only taking up around 3% of the land space. As such, cities present a crucial opportunity to combatting the causes of climate change, while needing an urgent mitigating of its effects. A city can be understood as an imbrication of a myriad of microclimates. Buildings change wind patterns and sunlight exposure, while the streetscapes changes soil permeability, runoff, and solar radiation.  

Urban Ecologies
For each man-made micro-climate, there exists a comparable natural condition. Using the logic of nature, our cities can be transformed into complex urban ecologies.

Biospheric Urbanism
Biospheric Urbanism is the study of the built environment as the interface between meteorology and geology. It aims at transforming the critical zone between above and below to better cope with uncertain changes in climate, while better using its underground resources.

Option Studio
The Option Studio will take New York City as its main subject of study in three acts.

The first act is to map the existing microclimates of the city, using all data available. This climatic cartography will help identify the most crucial area where each student decides to intervene.

The second act consists of conceiving a climatic project for the chosen area. A thorough analysis will be conducted of the existing physical conditions, with a special emphasis on the underground and its geology.

The third act is about the transformation of the chosen area into an urban ecology, effectively changing its microclimate. This will be achieved with the help of other fields like pedology, hydrology and ecology. The main ambition is to elaborate a pragmatic proposal that is based on a strong vision for the future.

TUNISIAN NIGHTSCAPES: Nocturnal Landscapes in the Medina of Tunis

The studio will reimagine six public spaces in the Medina of Tunis, Tunisia. Taking a long-term view over a 5 to 50–year timespan, the studio will ask how three interrelated areas of focus—housing, health, and changing climates—intersect with the urban landscape. The project will especially consider the design of nocturnal landscapes as one response to the rising temperatures associated with climate change.

The six sites are centered on the Madrassa Chammaia, Madrassa El Mouradia, Fondok Henna, 26 rue de Andalous, Rue Mfarej Hafsia, and Rue des Juges. We will ask how these sites can be reimagined in ways that can act as catalysts for the reshaping of the entire Medina. Affiliated with the Critical Landscapes Design Lab, the studio takes an approach to the design of urban spaces, deeply grounded in the environmental, economic, human, and political ecologies of Tunis.

Through a grounded research method called “landscape fieldwork,” students will engage with the Medina and its residents to gain a deep understanding of everyday life and spatial patterns that do not show up in official statistics, documents, or records. The landscape fieldwork approach combines landscape architects’ projective skills and tools for site analysis (drawing, measuring, photographing, remote sensing) with the ethnographic methods of anthropologists (participant observation, unstructured interviews, and writing reflexive fieldnotes), all as an integral part of a design process.

Students will work alone or in pairs on one of the given sites. Proposals may range in scale from the renovation and reuse of existing public spaces and the structures that frame them, to urban design guidelines, as a prelude to reimagining the Medina itself. The feasibility of projects will be tested in workshops with residents, property owners, and students. A reimagined Medina needs common design guidelines and policies that, through an aggregation of smaller, catalytic, developments, will provide a coherent spatial approach that respects and works with the Medina’s UNESCO world heritage status.

Landscape Architecture IV

Near-Future City

Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

This is the fourth and final semester for the core Landscape Architecture sequence. It questions ways in which we can design urban assemblages for the city during moments of deep and rapid transformation. The assemblages are explored as a basic “DNA” of the city in which urban, landscape and ecological elements are intertwined to imagine new ways of habitation for both human and non-human constituencies. 

This is an opportunity to speculate on a ‘Near-Future City’ that considers the city as a thick ground condition, one that describes a set of complex systems characterized by gradients between the static and the dynamic. Students will develop an understanding of the city and how it can adapt to future conditions.

The semester is structured around three phases of work: 01. metabolic flows and material processes, 02. urban assemblages for the near-future city, and 03. deployment and disposition of the assemblages.  The semester will begin by interrogating a particular set of systems at play in the urban environment and identifying key constituencies to be addressed. From here, the development and encoding of an urban assemblage is rigorously explored as an intertwined agglomeration of urban elements. Finally, in the last phase, students negotiate the formation of their assemblages in a sector of Boston.

The work will be guided by workshops, lectures, readings, discussions, and presentations. It will operate as a design laboratory through which different models will be tested and iterated. The work over the semester will culminate into a final exhibition and conversation surrounding the immediate proposals and the directions necessary for the responsible and ethical making of the Near-Future City.

Landscape Architecture II

The studio will explore how we might reimagine cemetery landscapes of the future in response to the challenges of the climate crisis, and the clear and present issues of social inequality. These issues are extensively shifting the ways we live, and, at the very least, are the uninvited corollary through which we might imagine new expressions of the cemetery.

As sites of remembrance, cemeteries may be considered as ‘places where memory crystalises and secretes itself as part of an ongoing construction of history’ (Pierre Nora 1989), whilst simultaneously acting as ‘settings in which memory is a real part of everyday experience’ (Michael Rothberg 2010). They are spaces that are socially produced and made productive in social practice (Lefebvre 1974), whilst also being highly logistical practical settings created in the absent presence of the body (Ken Warpole).

Just as death is a necessary part of life, cemeteries are sites of contrast, yet it is perhaps through the very preservation of this tension of contradiction that they exist as some of the most enduring landscapes across cultures around the world.

Often perceived as a space ‘apart’ from the city as a consequence of their physical traits and phenomenal characteristics, cemeteries none the less play significant roles within the life of the metropolis as biodiversity hotspots offering ecosystem services in the form of thermal regulation, stormwater management, and carbon absorption. They provide significant social functions such as spaces for people to seek sanctuary, reflection and play, and healthy spaces for individuals to contemplate in the context of a natural landscape.

Cemeteries, capable and perhaps charged to carry multiple meanings, are paradoxical spaces described by Foucault (1967) as ‘heterotopias’, a no place that, nonetheless, is. The studio will be exploring what the urban and social significance of the cemetery of the future could be, and ask what are the forms and cultural expressions the urban cemetery might project? How might the articulation of the material and physical space reinterpret the temporal experience of the cemetery, and how might the increasingly rich cultural diversity of a progressive society be celebrated through ritual and mediated through disparate processes of burial and internment? How might the cemetery critique and address the extensive environmental and social issues that are before us by proposing alternative organisational patterns and expression, a place that celebrates diverse beliefs and rituals, and a space as an important contribution to the city’s natural systems?

Creating Environmental Markets

There is a way out of the climate box we have created, though resistance to the necessary ecological transformation remains intense.  Sunk investments in existing infrastructure, broadly accepted design and economic theory, and the lifelong operations employment it has provided make the foundation of such resistance.  Creating Environmental Markets will examine alternative capital markets based in regulatory requirements but offering opportunities to use trades to restore ecology while providing economic incentives and jobs.

The climate problems we once anticipated have become a connected series of current crises: intense heat, extended drought, potable water shortages, almost spontaneous fires, floods, food shortages, enormous tornadoes and hurricanes, acute cold….  The prognosis for the coming decades is that these phenomena will get worse, yet our responses remain mostly mundane.  We repair, rebuild, extend, and expand essentially the same 19th Century energy and water infrastructure that put us in this climate box, evidently expecting a different outcome.

If we are to meet and overcome the climate challenges we have created, incentivizing environmental restoration over broad landscapes, from individual site designs to entire cityscapes, is essential.  The law as currently interpreted will not save us, but some combination of law and regulation together with markets creating economic incentives favoring ecological restoration of natural systems could.  In addition to recognizing the damage we have done we need a clear conception of required ecological repair.  Students will be introduced to that clear conception while examining a regulation-based market to incentivize ecological repair at scale, fostering the necessary energy and water infrastructure change.  

This class is intended for MLA, Planning, and Design students because their skills provide them the insights necessary to make such markets work, from individual site designs to cityscape master plans and establishing trading parameters.  They will participate in the construction of a water market for the Boston metropolitan region, understanding the ecological principles and restoration objectives driving market creation, and examining the politics and realities of using regulation to create such a market.  They will also examine the benefits of and potential for dramatic restorative change.  In their course case studies, students will use the information from the class to examine opportunities in self-selected cities around the world.  

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.

 

Up to five seats will be held for MDes students.