Design for Real Estate
This course provides a comprehensive understanding of the role of design and design professionals in real estate, from project conception to project delivery to post-occupancy evaluation. The goal is to provide developers and owners with the knowledge and methodological tools arising from design to conceive and execute distinctive, financially successful, socially responsible, and environmentally sustainable projects. The course will include lectures with class discussion, short exercises, field trips to recently completed and in-the-works projects, and several guest speakers.
The course begins with an overview of the design standards that shape contemporary building types within asset classes as demanded by building codes, development regulations, underwriting benchmarks, market preferences, and the global standardization of building components and furniture systems. Understanding the rationale for the plan configurations and circulation armatures of specific real estate types helps clarify the role of efficiency metrics as key determinants of building design and the way that space is best configured to create future financial, social, and environmental value. The course also covers the market and regulatory-driven logic of site planning, including the relationship between streets, blocks, and development parcels in urban and suburban contexts.
Beyond exploring the programmatic and spatial interdependency of the components that make up real estate, the course looks at a variety of methods for integrating financial analysis and design considerations especially at when projects are being conceptualized. Students will be asked to explore approaches that balance risk mitigation, typically accomplished by relying on pre-existing models (“comps”), with more innovative approaches that aim to capture market share by defining new needs and audiences and proposing unprecedented but financially viable spatial and aesthetic configurations.
The course explores the interplay between developer as client and designer as professional, with special consideration for how the knowledge and skills of designers can be utilized more effectively by real estate practitioners. This is a required course for students in the Master in Real Estate program, but is open as well to urban design, planning, architecture, and landscape students who are interested in learning about the many ways that various considerations, including efficiency metrics, risk mitigation, and land values, shape contemporary buildings and new urban districts.
Although this is a limited enrollment course, MRE students should enroll directly during the open enrollment period and not enter the Limited Enrollment Course Lottery.
Analytic Methods of Urban Planning: Quantitative [Module 2]
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 the broader analytic landscape. It then exposes students to basic descriptive statistics (including measures of central tendency and dispersion), principles of statistical inference, and a wide variety of analytic methods and their practical application. By the end of the course, students will be comfortable with many analytic techniques relevant to urban planning and policy, including: z-tests, t-tests, ANOVA, chi square tests, correlation, and multivariate regression. On a broader level, students will gain the ability to understand and critically question the kinds of analyses and representations of quantitative data encountered in urban planning and allied disciplines.
The aim of the course is to introduce students to key concepts and tools in quantitative analysis and research. Most importantly, however, the goal is to develop students’ intuition regarding data analysis and the application of statistical techniques. By the end of the course, students will be familiar with how common techniques of quantitative analysis can be applied to a wide variety of data. Students will also gain a sense of the strengths and weaknesses of quantitative data analysis and under what circumstances the tools learned in the class are best applied in practice. The course seeks to train technically competent, intellectually critical practitioners and scholars who are able to apply quantitative methods in a wide range of settings, and who are also aware of the wider analytic context into which these approaches fit. There is a focus throughout the course on epistemology and the ethics of claim-making. Over the course, students will deepen their understanding of how claims are made, how claims are connected to different forms of evidence, and what makes different kinds of claims credible.
Analytic Methods of Urban Planning: Qualitative [Module 2]
How can planners understand places in a rich, meaningful, and yet systematic way? This module examines how qualitative approaches can be used in planning practice and research. Qualitative methods are particularly useful in answering why and how questions; investigating differing perceptions and values; understanding unique situations; and helping describe complex situations.
Focused on learning-by-doing, the class examines how to design a qualitative research project and reviews a range of data collection and analysis methods useful in community and organizational environments. With the aid of well-thought-out conceptual frameworks, qualitative research can be designed to make a coherent and meaningful argument. Students learn about collecting and reviewing artifacts, observing places, asking questions, engaging with diverse groups, and using visual techniques. Such data are frequently organized into specific kinds of outputs including case studies, scenarios, and evaluations. Students will try out these approaches in weekly exercises.
Field Studies in Real Estate, Urban Planning and Design
Field Studies in Real Estate, Urban Planning and Design: Redeveloping the historic AMTRAK Penn Central train station district in Baltimore, MD and the I-195 riverfront corridor in Providence, RI
This course provides students with an understanding of the dynamics and complexities of real world development that create contemporary urban physical environments. The course emphasizes the integration of urban planning, urban design and development aspects of projects that respond to realistic market demand, political, financial, regulatory, and stakeholder constraints. It is designed for urban planners, designers, and real estate students to broaden their understanding of solving complex urban and economic development problems, as well as to improve their skills in master planning, design, financial, and ESG impact analysis.
The pedagogical objectives of the course are as following:
1. to introduce students to the intrinsic linkage between financial soundness and design creativity required in the process of real estate development
2. to introduce students to the framework of capital market mechanisms and the broad range of activities involved in achieving successful real estate development with special attention to the various roles played by professional service providers
3. to expose students to as many aspects of real estate issues and decision-making challenges as possible. Students will work in teams of four or five. The teams may change from the first to second part of the course.
4. During the semester, investigations include development feasibility studies (market, physical, environmental, financial, regulatory and political), site planning, master planning, urban design, building design, financing-public/private joint ventures, public and ESG (environmental, social, governance) impact, and other critical factors for creating the best strategic vision for each project.
Cost to students for local travel (Providence, RI) will be meals, incidentals, and ground transportation to Providence, RI. Cost to students for travel to Baltimore, MD will be $150 (term-billed) plus meals and incidentals.
8 seats are included in the GSD Limited Enrollment Course Lottery. Students selected in the Lottery will be prioritized for the Baltimore site. The course will accommodate additional students who will focus on the Providence site.
SCHEDULE NOTE, this course meets on Tuesday, September 5th at 6 PM in Gund 318. Students who are enrolled or waitlisted through the GSD Limited Enrollment Course Lottery must attend or contact the instructor.
The first day of GSD classes, Tuesday, September 5th, is held as a MONDAY schedule. After the evening meeting noted above, the first official class meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 12th. It will meet regularly thereafter.
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 the competition through its familiar allocative price-setting framework. However, because one person’s use of land affects individual and collective interests of others and market mechanisms alone do not always protect or promote such interests, laws enacted by legislative bodies, administered by government agencies, and reviewed by courts have arisen to fill the gap.
Encompassed in local ordinances, higher-level legislation, administrative rules, discretionary government decisions, constitutions, and judicial opinions, land use laws and environmental laws significantly shape the built and natural environment. For example, zoning’s use and density restrictions affect whether neighborhoods are demographically diverse or homogeneous, its height and setback restrictions sculpt the skyline. Environmental laws govern the extent to which land uses pollute air, water, and land, whether habitat is available for endangered species, and whether wetlands are preserved. Recently enacted laws are beginning to address the impacts of climate change, determining whether and how individuals may build or rebuild in areas vulnerable to floods, severe storms, forest fires, heat waves, and droughts.
Through lectures, discussions, readings, and a written exercise, this course provides students with a working knowledge of land use laws and environmental laws, the institutions that create, implement, and review them, and the issues that swirl around them. The course distinguishes law’s method from those employed by other disciplines and fields. The role of non-lawyers, including urban planners, designers, public policymakers, developers, and community activists in influencing, drafting, and implementing land use and environmental laws, is explored.
No prior legal background is assumed. Students with a legal background have found the course instructive. For pedagogical reasons, laws employed in the United States will be the main references, but comparisons with laws in other countries will be regularly made. Reading assignments are drawn from primary sources (legislation, constitutions, judicial opinions) and secondary sources (law review and journal articles, book excerpts, professional reports). A written exercise asks students to critically examine one provision of a zoning law and draft its replacement. An oral final exam will test overall fluency with the course subject matter.
The first day of GSD classes, Tuesday, September 5th, is held as a MONDAY schedule. As this course meets on Mondays, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 5th. It will meet regularly thereafter.
This course is jointly listed with HKS as SUP-663.
Real Estate Finance, Development, and Management
This course teaches the fundamentals of real estate for all major property types and land uses. The various stages of the development process, including site selection, market analysis, financial feasibility, design considerations, legal requirements, construction oversight, lease-up, operations, and ultimate property disposition, are examined. Acquisition, management, and disposition of existing real estate assets are similarly explored. Teaching cases are designed to place students in decision-making situations commonly faced by real estate professionals. Methods of using discounted cash flow analysis for income property, for-sale property, construction and permanent mortgage loans, joint venture structures, real estate investment trusts, and secondary markets are explored. Optional review sessions focusing on real estate financial analysis will support the course. MRE students are required to take this course but may pursue a waiver of this requirement by successfully passing a waiver examination administered during orientation week. Other students will need to demonstrate a basic literacy in real estate through prior coursework or experience in order to take the class.
Although this is a limited enrollment course, MRE students should enroll directly during the open enrollment period and not enter the Limited Enrollment Course Lottery.
The first day of GSD classes, Tuesday, September 5th, is held as a MONDAY schedule. As this course meets on Mondays, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 5th. It will meet regularly thereafter.
Urban Design Contexts and Operations
The course focusses essentially on modern, including contemporary, contexts and operations that have emerged during the past 100 or so years. Here urban design is broadly regarded as a concern for the ‘thingness’ of constructed environments above the scale of singular buildings and in response to resolving competing claims brought to bear through design. Contexts refer to particular situations and orientations taken in urban design, whereas operations refer to actions involved in specific work and practical applications. It is a lecture-seminar class where participation is required of those in the first semester of Urban Design Program of the Harvard Graduate School of Design and is intended to satisfy this program’s curriculum requirement in ‘History-Theory’. Students will be required to make one-page summaries of selected readings each alternative or second week of the semester and assigned in pairs or threesomes to make presentations of further materials and several urban design projects beginning in the second week of class. The aim is to introduce students to important developments and literacy in the field of urban design, along with matters of on-going and current speculation. What follows is an outline of weekly topics along with a short reading list for each that forms a background for the lectures and later discussion. Apart from making a one-page summary each second week of the assigned text and specific assigned presentations in a given week, all students are expected to prepare and participate in seminar discussions. All lecture components for each week’s theme will be available in asynchronous pre-recorded illustrated form.
Enrollment in this course is limited to incoming students in the GSD Master of Urban Design program.
The first day of GSD classes, Tuesday, September 5th, is held as a MONDAY schedule. As this course meets on Mondays, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 5th. It will meet regularly thereafter.
Building and Urban Conservation and Renewal – Assessment, Analysis, Design
What are the values inherent in a property, site or district that must be understood to craft conservation policy and interventions that will reveal, complement, sustain and enhance the original work while appropriately addressing socio-cultural, aesthetic and technical integrity? This course will introduce students to the functional, technical, regulatory and environmental principles of working with existing buildings and districts to ensure their continued viability.
Globally, 35% or more of construction activity is devoted to work on existing structures – making the sustainability mantra “the greenest building is the one already built” increasingly relevant as we seek to minimize the impact of construction on the environment. Repair and renewal are therefore fundamental components of contemporary practice increasingly requiring facility in techniques of conservation planning and execution, rehabilitation and adaptive reuse.
Designed to ground the participant in the methodologies of conservation and renewal and to introduce the tools necessary to successfully approach working with existing buildings in established precincts, the course will include lectures by the instructor and guest experts, and in-class discussions from readings. While interventions must include sound technical solutions, any modification from conservation to renovation and additions must address the full complement of values necessary to enable an economically viable, socio-culturally relevant rehabilitation. We will examine a range of conservation and intervention case studies at the building and urban scale for both traditional and modern structures and sites – including a mini-module on the impending renovations to Gund Hall.
We will look critically at how the international Charters and Standards employed in working with historic fabric impact our approach to modifications to any existing building or site from a technical, design and regulatory standpoint, and will particularly address the question as to how the apparatus of conservation is changing to best serve both underrepresented constituencies and the legacy of modernism and the recent past.
The course is a lecture course, with a class discussion component. Evaluation will be based upon participation in readings and themed discussion, submission of a short analytical mid-term paper, and a choice of final project: either 1., an assessment and intervention design exercise on an undeveloped modest property, or 2., an analytical case study of the rehabilitation and transformation of a significant property – either of the student’s choosing.
The course is open to all interested GSD students.
Structuring Urban Experience: From the Athenian Acropolis to the Boston Common
This lecture course examines selected cities between the fifth century B.C. and the seventeenth century A.D., beginning with ancient Athens and ending with the rebuilding of London after the great fire in 1666 and the founding of Boston. It is not, however, a survey. Rather, the lectures take up one city at one “golden moment” of its development and propose a theme or themes for discussion. The course, therefore, is both chronologically and thematically structured.
The first half of the semester treats the ancient and late antique city, beginning with Athens and continuing with Alexandria, Rome, Constantinople and Antioch. This section concludes with a consideration of the effects of Christianization on urban form, the widespread decline of urban habitation in the early Middle Ages, and the rising importance of ideal or symbolic “cities of the mind.” The second half of the semester looks at selected instances of Renaissance and Baroque urban interventions, beginning with Florence, returning again to Rome, and then moving to Venice, Madrid, Paris, London and Boston.
Community Engagement Workshop: Making Artifacts that Educate and Empower
The premise of participatory design and planning is that people should have a say in how their buildings, neighborhoods, and cities are shaped. But people are obviously more likely to participate when they’re interested in—and informed about—the means by which buildings, neighborhoods, and cities are shaped, as well as the consequences of opposing outcomes. Towards that, this class invites you to conceive of, design, and fabricate educational engagement artifacts that help members of the public understand and make decisions about complex built environment-related issues of your choosing. Engagement artifacts could take the form of physical things like interactive models, board games, or window displays; printed materials like graphic novels, newsletters, or fold-out posters; or digital materials like videos, websites, or apps. The source for the built environment-related issues you explore could be issues you are working on in other classes, issues you are curious and want to better understand yourself, or issues that one of our project-based partners have asked us to consider. (This class can be taken as a project-based class.) Depending on the issue you address, the audience for your artifact—the “members of the public” referred to above—could be very specific (for example, underrepresented youths in a specific geography), very general, or somewhere in between. A major goal will be to learn how to make engagement artifacts that meet people where they are at, that are user-friendly and fun, and that appeal to your target audience’s aesthetic sensibilities. Class time will consist of group crits, precedent studies of innovative educational engagement artifacts created by designers and planners, and seminar-style discussions of key readings in this critical but often overlooked aspect of community engagement.