Urban Transportation Planning and Implementation

This course examines the policy, politics, planning, and implementation of transportation systems in urban areas. We will explore a broad range of topics that touch on the urban planning framework (geography, demand, and supply); transportation/land use connections; tools and standards (basic traffic engineering and demand modeling concepts); policies (congestion pricing, sustainability, transportation finance, parking); process (project implementation and evaluation), including the evolving landscape of shared mobility, connected vehicles, and new transportation technologies.

Special focus will be given to the Boston context and “culture” of primary agencies and constituencies, examining land use and density, housing affordability, economic growth and connectivity, equity and environmental sustainability.  The course content will focus on detecting, analyzing and considering both persistence and change in primary factors over time and pattern breaks.  Our goal is to elicit class discussion, to spark your own thinking, and have you challenge the assumptions behind “conventional wisdom” in transportation planning.

The format of the course will include weekly readings, lectures, and two-three-hour walking tours (scheduled outside of the weekly meeting) — one featuring highlights of Boston’s transportation history and the other focused on the transportation issues that will be pertinent to assignments. Students are expected to come to class having read the required readings, submit to the class website a one-paragraph (no more than 150 word) response to the readings each week, and to participate actively in class discussions. Students will complete five assignments during the course, two of which will be assigned to groups of three or more.  A detailed assignment sheet will be posted for each assignment along with recommended resources.  Student evaluations will be based on participation (reading responses, discussions, and presentations) and written assignments.

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 are disproportionately burdened by capitalist urbanization and development. In the US, the dominant focus has been on personal or group development and widening access to opportunities, with a growing reliance on market incentives to deliver housing options and spur economic development. Yet for many communities at the margins, development has rather connoted practices of freedom— freedom from oppression and deprivation; freedom to enjoy one’s time, make choices, and experience life as abundance and possibility. Thus conceived, community development is less a question of remedial policy than acts of resistance, claiming rights and power, and strengthening collective ownership and governance capacity over productive infrastructures and resources.

The course begins with an examination of evolving patterns, drivers, and explanations of urban inequality and poverty and corresponding urban policy and planning responses— with a primary focus on the US but in comparative world-historical perspective. We trace the evolution of community development from the Progressive Era to the contemporary period, where global trends such as urban-based economic growth and the new urban agenda are pushing community development practice beyond the neighborhood scale to local, metropolitan, and even supranational scales. In critically analyzing community development concepts and strategies, the course pays close attention to the dilemma of race that has continued to define capitalism, politics, and spatial production in America as well as divided working class and progressive movements, including those defining the field of community development. We also draw insights from historic movements that have sought to change race relations in America in connection with global assaults on capitalism, empire, and patriarchy.

For students to further develop their own community development agendas and skills, the course is built around a speaker series and discussion sessions focused on applied practices and cases. Notwithstanding significant advancements in affordable housing development, social service delivery, and placemaking— the traditional mainstay of community development— the course focuses on emerging community development approaches such as transformative economic projects built on community-labor partnerships, anchor-based strategies, and cooperative ownership and wealth creation. It also surveys innovative sectoral practices focused on renewable energy, mobility and access, food justice and sovereignty, and art, culture, and fashion. Guest speakers will moreover include political organizers and leaders working to build intersectional movements that inform progressive urban policy and planning agendas and community development goals.

Course evaluations will be based on three assignments (blog entry, semi-structured interview, and applied research project) and class participation. It has no prerequisites and is open to graduate students across different disciplines.

 

Planning for Climate Change: Scarcity, Abundance, and the Idea of the Future

Climate change presents a range of complex challenges for urban planning and design. This class will explore the conditions planners face in response to the material and social impacts of climate-impacted places – sea level rise, extreme weather events, intensified conflicts over water rights, climate refugees, loss of livelihoods and other economic stressors, to name a few – as well as ask what responsibility rests on our shoulders to use the tools of planning and design to mitigate climate change?

We will approach anthropogenic climate change as a specific case of an older and broader challenge: How should planners design settlements to be flexible and responsive to changing environments? How can planning foster healthier relationships between people and non-human nature? To this end, we will examine moments of existential environmental crises in the past (e.g. the American Dust Bowl), explore the role that planners played in addressing these crises, and consider how global climate change poses fundamentally new problems. We will also explore the long history of climate predictions and their changing relevance over time. What should we make, for example, of calls to switch to new energy regimes in the 1920s, or of solar building designs in the 1950s?

Thinking about the ways in which scientifically-based warnings of scarcity have been ignored and/or mobilized over time, we will explore the politics of climate change, including the evolution of climate change discourse and the implications of current politics for planners. We will consider how the vocabulary of climate planning (sustainability, adaptation and mitigation, resilience, the Anthropocene) has been used and contested, and how different climate futures have been envisioned and evoked in different contexts relevant to planning and design.

This critical perspective on climate change planning as a necessary but politically fraught endeavor will bring us to the question of how planners should approach climate change data. How should we interpret models and predictions as the basis for action? How should we interpret and represent scientific uncertainty in practice? How can we determine which precautionary measures are most urgent?

Environment, Economics, and Enterprise

How can one optimize the benefits of environmental or social sustainability while generating a higher return on investment in buildings? Where are the opportunities for real estate initiatives that are highly functional, healthy, aesthetically pleasing and financially rewarding? The challenge to designers, developers, environmental consultants, policy-makers and other professionals lies in finding and communicating these synergies. This cross-disciplinary course will give students an approach to problem solving to help them contribute to thoughtful, high-impact decisions about design and construction that are both environmentally/socially impactful and economically effective.

At the end of the course students will be able to…
– identify sustainability opportunities for their projects. Identify sustainable/economic win-win solutions
– translate enhanced design into a project 's financial pro forma, and communicate the financial impact clearly to market makers
– complete accurate cost benefit economic analysis, with realistic assumptions on ability to finance and ability (if any) to obtain premium value on exit
– analyze market demand for projects with and without enhanced sustainability design
– think about how to finance their projects and where to go for capital
– explain their ideas in the language of decision-makers, from community groups to financial investors

Students from all GSD disciplines are encouraged to participate.
No prerequisites.

U. S. Housing Markets, Problems, and Policies

This course will examine the operation of U.S. housing markets, the principal housing problems facing the nation, and the policy approaches available to address these problems within the existing political, regulatory and market context.  The course is structured around four central housing problems that are the focus of US housing policy:  the inability of a large share of renters to obtain housing that meets generally accepted affordability standards; the challenges facing low-income and minority households in attaining homeownership; the high degree of residential segregation by race/ethnicity and income and associated differential access to public and private resources that results; and how housing policy can support broader efforts at community development.  Each section of the course will develop a detailed understanding of the nature of the problem, how the operation of housing markets either produce or fail to address the problem, introduce the principal federal, state and local policy approaches available to address the problem, and wrestle with critical policy questions that arise in choosing how best to address the problem.

The goal of the course is to build both a foundation of knowledge and a critical perspective needed to diagnose the genesis of the nation’s housing problems, to identify the potential policy levers for addressing these failures, and assess the relative merits of alternative approaches.  Class sessions will be a mixture of lecture and class discussions focusing on the assigned readings.  Students will be expected to come to class prepared to be fully engaged participants in these discussions. Over the course of the semester, students will be required to prepare periodic reviews of assigned readings shared on Canvas, submit a 5-page paper making the case for a specific policy proposal, and complete a take home final exam.  The course is intended for graduate students with an interest in US housing policy, although no previous background in housing policy or disciplinary training is required.

Housing and Urbanization in Global Cities

The subject of Housing and Urbanization in Global Cities examines housing policy and planning in urban societies around the world and especially in the Global South. Through slide presentations, discussions, guest lectures, texts, and exercises, we examine the dynamic growth of cities; the ideological impulses to combat slum conditions and provide mass housing; the resulting anti-slum and housing programs; the means of financing such programs; and the effects of design and planning on people and their communities.

The first part of the course is devoted to history and theory. We examine the historical emergence of the twin problems of slums and housing in Europe during its era of intense urbanization; the export of Western housing and anti-slum policies to the developing world; the furious debate over the nature of informal settlements in the Global South; and the fundamental concepts of land use and housing policy.

In the second part of the course, we take up the practical application of housing policies in different national environments around the globe. Using the cases of Bogotá, Mumbai, Johannesburg, and Beijing, we study the ways private developers, planners, designers, non-government organization officers, and government officials work within local systems of land use, law, and finance to respond to informal settlements and produce homes for people. Students will work in teams to evaluate specific housing programs in the first three cities and in the fourth, Beijing, to propose a planning strategy to improve particular sites.

This course helps prepare students for international planning and design studios, housing studios, and courses on housing or social policy in general. It will appeal to graduate school designers, planners, and public policy students interested in social engagement and the diverse methods of producing low-income housing in global cities. Other than graduate school enrollment, there are no prerequisites.

Jointly Offered Course: HKS SUP-662

Theories for Practice in Conflict, Crisis, and Recovery

Course topics and objectives:

How do we understand the relationship between crisis, recovery and the built environment at the beginning of the 21st century? Conflicts and disasters are both symptoms and evidence of asymmetrical urban, territorial, and social development. For this reason, any ethically defensible response to a catastrophic event should go beyond “mere” reconstruction and imagine new, more resilient, and more equitable forms of urbanization. This research seminar will therefore examine situations of ‘post-disaster recovery’, as an opportunity to rethink, conceptually redefine, and proactively reconstruct or reconfigure new forms of urbanization.

To begin, we explore the social construction of crisis, disasters and emergencies through a critical interpretive lens, as well as situate contemporary discourses on disaster response within theories of modernization, crisis, and the ‘natural’. We identify the conditions under which certain crises or related challenges are considered normal or routine, as opposed to exceptional. We move beyond the abstract to ground our inquiry in the physical world. We examine the variety of actors involved in recovery interventions – including international institutions, NGOs, citizens, professional planners, political parties – and critically reflect on the role of technology and infrastructure, and various other methodologies deployed to achieve post-disaster aims.

Course format and methods of evaluation:

This course is a reading, writing, and research seminar. It requires sustained participation throughout the semester. Readings span multiple disciplines in the social sciences: urban studies, geography, sociology, political philosophy, and science and technology studies (STS). Some assignments are collective, others individual. Several guests will present themes ranging from the history of disaster, to post-conflict reconciliation, and new technologies of crisis response. Students will use a variety of methodologies such as analytical mapping and design techniques as well as archival, survey, planning, ecological, engineering, and critical conservation practices to offer projective ideas and grounded proposals for novel reconstruction practices that aim for a more vibrant, sustainable, and equitable urbanism.

Building and Leading Real Estate Enterprises and Entrepreneurship

This course focuses on how you conceive, build and lead successful real estate companies. By virtue of the industry in which they compete, real estate companies are almost always founded and developed by entrepreneurs. A few grow to become category killers; others are able to compete in a crowded and competitive landscape. Many, however, are eventually closed down; sometimes due to changing market forces, sometimes due to lack of good corporate strategy or execution, and sometimes due to the founder neglecting to institutionalize a lasting organization to succeed him or her.

Taught through a combination of lectures, cases and analytical problems, this course examines (primarily through the lens of real estate investment and development companies), the critical ingredients required to grow and lead long-term competitive enterprises. The course will begin with an examination of how to optimize the performance of real properties and then migrate to the design and development of successful companies that own or service properties.

At the end of this course, students should gain a deeper appreciation of how owners think and act when they oversee their companies. They will specifically be introduced to how to develop a robust strategy, capital plan, corporate culture and execution capability that are part of every great real estate company. Students taking this course should also be able to construct the elements of a simple business plan for a startup. Students are also encouraged to think about how they may launch their own real estate enterprise during the course, and to make active use of other Harvard resources, including Harvard clubs and facilities like the I-lab, as they think through their entrepreneurial opportunities.

Paired Course: Although not mandatory, this course is meant to be taken in conjunction with GSD 5275,  which meets the first half of the semester; it is also 2 credits and meets at the same time as 5276. GSD 5276 will build on many of the questions and concepts that 5275 postulates.

Advanced Real Estate Finance

This course builds on GSD 5204 and comparable introductory real estate courses offered by other schools at Harvard. This year’s course covers five main topics: (1) Advanced Financial Analysis and Deal Structuring for Acquisitions (including waterfalls), (2) Advanced Financial Analysis and Structuring for Land and Development Projects, (3) Debt Financing and Debt Investments, (4) Real Estate Market Cycles and Portfolio Structuring, (5) Management and recovery of Assets in a Distressed Environment

The objective of the course is to give students in-depth financial analytical skills for project acquisitions and development, real estate financing, and portfolio management. Using case studies and lectures, the course focuses on advanced real estate topics for all major real estate product-types including apartments, office, retail, industrial, single-family, and land development. A major emphasis in the class is to build students’ financial modeling skills and their knowledge of advanced industry practices. Many cases will require students to apply a full range of acquisition, development, investment, disposition, financing, and management decisions at the property level. Key decision-making for all phases of the development process including site selection, design, financing, construction, leasing, operations, and sales are stressed throughout the first half of the course. Other strategic requirements for completing successful projects such as acquisition due diligence, debt and equity structuring, market cycle timing, and asset recovery in a distressed environment are covered during the other half.

Paired Course: Although not mandatory, this course is meant to be taken in conjunction with GSD 5276, which takes place in the second half of the semester; it is also 2 credits and meets at the same time as 5275. GSD 5276 will build on many of the questions and concepts that 5275 postulates.

Cities by Design II: Projects, Processes, and Outcomes

Cities are palimpsests. They are the spatial manifestations of a layering and re-layering of social and environmental systems over time. Cities by Design II is a lecture/seminar that introduces students to contemporary urban design projects through the case study method, with emphasis on critical contextualization and implementation. GSD faculty and outside experts will introduce 15-20 projects with lectures, readings, and class discussions. Beyond familiarizing students with contemporary urban design projects, this course will equip students with an understanding of the broader implications of urban design including historical contexts, institutional influences, financing mechanisms, stakeholder involvement, and other process-related aspects of urban design. Students will examine projects through two lenses: (1) Infrastructure (the what), and (2) Agency (the who, how, and why).

This year, case studies will be organized by Paradigm: Parks, Linear Infrastructures, Campuses, Megaform Cities, Housing Developments, Brownfield Reclamation, Resilient Systems, Component Aggregations, Conservation, Slums, and New Districts.

There are two main pedagogical objectives that guide the course: (1) Engage students in a comparative study of contemporary urban design projects as a way to broaden their understanding of how urban design happens, and (2) Explore the interrelationship of urban politics and urban design through projects that range in context, scale, and operational capacity. Upon completion of the course, students will be able to:

Term grades will be based on attendance and participation in lectures and section discussions, student group presentations, and a final paper or project. The year-long ‘Cities by Design’ course is mandatory for all incoming Masters of Urban Design Students. All other students are welcome to enroll in the course by semester, and need not do so in sequence. No Prerequisites.