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Eve Blau among the newly elected members of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

  Eve Blau, adjunct professor of the history and theory of urban form and design and director of research at the Harvard GSD, joins 16 Harvard faculty as newly elected members of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. In 2022, the academy inducted 261 new members to honor exceptional scholars, leaders, artists, and innovators engaged in advancing the public good. The complete list of new members can be viewed on the American Academy’s website. “We are celebrating a depth of achievements in a breadth of areas,” said David Oxtoby, President of the American Academy. “These individuals excel in ways that excite us and inspire us at a time when recognizing excellence, commending expertise, and working toward the common good is absolutely essential to realizing a better future.” Founded in 1780, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences honors excellence and convenes leaders from every field of human endeavor to examine new ideas, address issues of importance to the nation and the world, and work together “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.” At the GSD, Blau teaches courses on urban history and theory, modern architecture, urban form, and issues of representation. She also leads core and elective courses on Urban Design, including the Urban Design Proseminar: History, Theory, Practice; Cities by Design; Urban Form: Transition as Condition. In recent years she has taught a series of research seminars: Berlin as Laboratory; Baku: Oil and Urbanism; Mapping Cultural Space Across Eurasia. In addition to serving as Director of Research at the GSD, Blau is Co-Director of the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, a cross-Harvard initiative supported by funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Her most recent publication Baku: Oil and Urbanism (2018), received the 2019 DAM Architectural Book Award from the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in collaboration with the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Sara Arman (MUP ’22): Promoting Health Equity through Community Organizing and Urban Planning

For Sara Arman (MUP ’22), community organizing is essential. When Arman graduated from Tufts with a bachelor in international relations and Middle Eastern studies, she began working with the Women and Public Policy Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. At the same time, she says, “I was looking for ways to get involved with community organizing outside of my work.” Through Arman’s involvement in the Chelsea, Massachusetts, planning board, she heard a number of proposals for urban development and housing projects. Her interest in the field, as well as a conversation with the director of a local housing nonprofit, led her to pursue urban planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. During her studies, Arman also worked as the health equity corps coordinator for GreenRoots, an environmental justice organization in Chelsea, a small, densely populated city with a large low-income immigrant population. It is also her hometown. When she was in high school, GreenRoots helped Arman receive a discounted youth transit pass. She says, “GreenRoots first helped me think about transit through a lens of equity and justice. Providing youth with safe and affordable transit is essential in a dense urban community like Chelsea.” Years later, Arman’s work with GreenRoots shows her commitment to collaborative, nonhierarchical community organizing. In the early days of COVID-19, she made emergency food deliveries, translated documents for community members, and helped create a neighborhood wellness system so residents could assist each other. As the pandemic continued, Arman became involved in vaccine outreach and equity efforts. She explains, “I didn’t have any public health experience beforehand—I came to it through community organizing.” Such work, Arman notes, involves “building community and connections across all residents.” At GreenRoots, she collaborated with other community organizations and local government to make Chelsea one of the most vaccinated cities in Massachusetts, with 92 percent of residents vaccinated. “[The] beautiful part of doing community organizing where you grew up,” Arman says, “is being able to rely on the relationships that you already have.” The leader of the Chelsea Black Community, an organization that GreenRoots partnered with, for example, was Arman’s elementary school nurse. “Having those relationships and trust with each other makes your work so much more meaningful. The people that you’re working in service of are your community members,” she says. Throughout her studies, Arman kept asking herself: “How can I take the skills and resources at Harvard and bring them back to my community—to further public health and enhance life in Chelsea?” Software skills from GSD studios and projects have facilitated more detailed and effective community efforts: Arman used GIS in her vaccine equity work to map out ethnic and racial disparities on a block by block level. And an independent study, which gave her access to information about real estate and leases, helped her write a lease agreement for a community land trust in Chelsea. Classes at Harvard Divinity School, taught by a Muslim chaplain, provided “spiritual nourishment” and encouragement to continue her organizing work. Arman’s community organizing has also informed her work at the GSD. Her COVID vaccine outreach has led her to ask, “What are the ways we do health outreach for kids? How do you engage their parents? How do you create materials that are easily accessible and understandable for kids?” These questions led her to a child policy class at the Kennedy School, where Arman researched the racial and spatial disparities that make Chelsea children disproportionately vulnerable to climate change. Her paper advocates for a holistic approach to environmental justice—one that centers community participation and agency. After she graduates, Arman intends to work at the intersection of public health and urban policy, to foster “vibrant, safe, and joyful” cities. She says, “How can the built, physical, and natural environment promote people’s health overall—whether that’s through enhancing green spaces for mental health, or transit systems for access to community health centers? What are the interventions you can do in the built environment that will impact people’s health outcomes?” Read more profiles from the GSD Class of 2022.

Three Alumni Win the Architectural League Prize of New York 2022

Three alumni have been named winners of the 2022 Architectural League Prize of New York. The Architectural League Prize is an annual competition, lecture series, and exhibition organized by The Architectural League and its Young Architects and Designers Committee. The winners’ lectures and installations provide a lively public forum for the discussion of their work and ideas. These winners will create installations of their work onsite at a location of their choice or in a digital format to be presented in an online exhibition on archleague.org, opening June 14th, 2002. This year’s theme of the League Prize: Grounding.

Congratulations to:

• Francisco Quinones MArch ’14, Departamento del Distrito
• Maggie Tsang MDes ’19 and Isaac Stein MLA ’20, MDes ’20, Dept.

To learn more about each winning project, please visit Dept. and Departamento del Distrito .

Read about the 2022 Awardees .

A Call to Action: Just City Mayoral Fellows Discuss Design Interventions to Address Racial Injustice in America

“Everything we do at the GSD,” Dean Sarah Whiting said, “is affected by or affects cities.” On Friday, April 22, the GSD hosted the concluding event of the 2022 Just City Mayoral Fellowship, a collaboration between the Mayors Institute on City Design (MICD) and the Harvard GSD’s Just City Lab, supported by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The event brought seven mayors together for a discussion on how design and planning interventions can promote racial and infrastructural justice. In her opening remarks, Dr. Maria Rosario Jackson, the chair of the NEA and the first urban planner to hold the role, said: “It’s in this kind of forum that one can see the critically important role that arts, culture, creativity, and design have in advancing healthy communities and cities.” Trinity Simons, the executive director of the MICD, shared the MICD’s ambition to “equip mayors to be the chief urban designers of their cities.” She said that following George Floyd’s murder in 2020, “We saw mayors asking: What does it mean to achieve racial justice in the built environment?” To address this, Simons reached out to Toni L. Griffin, the founder of the Just City Lab and a professor in practice of urban planning at the GSD. Now in its second year, the fellowship involves an 11-week curriculum of “readings, lectures, and open and honest discussion.” Mayors also proposed projects for their city, with design and development professionals performing “design jury duty” to share their expertise and feedback.

Just Cities, Infrastructures, and Community Building

Griffin then invited the first panel of mayors onto the stage: Jacob R. Day (Salisbury, MD), Emily Larson (Duluth, MN), Jamael Tito Brown (Youngstown, OH), and John T. Tecklenberg (Charleston, SC). Mayor Tecklenberg began by describing the importance of reconciliation in Charleston, given its history: “We are the city where almost 50 percent of enslaved Africans were brought to North America. Our city, in the early 1800s, derived its budget from the sale, the rental, and the possession of enslaved persons.” His project proposal for the fellowship was a linear park to “knit together” a historically African American neighborhood that was ripped apart by a highway project 70 years ago. “We’e going to reconnect those neighborhoods and achieve some social justice.” A native of Youngstown, Mayor Brown noted that the city was a former steel mill town that saw a sharp decline in population after the Great Depression. Those who moved away often had more education and socioeconomic capital than those who stayed, and Brown is attentive to the inequities that still exist today, especially in infant mortality and life expectancy: “It’s not fair that if you live on one side of the tracks, you’re at 71 years,” and “just half a mile down the tracks . . . they’re at 76 or 75.” As mayor, Brown relies on citizen organizations within the city, as well as his own background as a former organizer to “get people to the table.” Mayor Larson shared her aspirations for Duluth: “How can we use the physical public infrastructure to create a sense of radical belonging for our community?” She emphasized the importance of making intentional investments to redress historical harms. “Justice takes fundamental investment, and we have built centuries of systems with great intention and investment to make them unfair. We know budgets are moral documents.” As Larson invests in new systems and approaches, she is committed to a thoughtful approach: “You can go fast and get things done, or you can go slow and embed the work.” According to Mayor Day, symbolic and concrete work must be done to address a history of injustice in Salisbury. His administration pushed to replace a Confederate monument at a county court with a monument to three men who were lynched there. This was Salisbury’s way of “recognizing that we must tell the truth about our past.” But Day also acknowledged the incompleteness of this gesture. “Symbols matter, but symbols are fairly easy. So what comes next? . . . Decisions about paving, housing, access, and proximity to jobs are the tougher work.” Day encouraged GSD students to become involved: “The beauty of design and policy is not only that you appreciate the making of these spaces, but you’ve also gone through an education that has taught you [when] to stop the planning and start making, doing. At some point you have to build that final model, right?”

Just Cities, Infrastructures, and the College Town

Griffin then invited the next panel of mayors to discuss how infrastructural justice concerns intersect with the needs and conflicts of college towns: Satya Rhodes-Conway (Madison, WI), Mayor Levar M. Stoney (Richmond, VA), and Patrick L. Wojahn (College Park, MD). Mayor Wojahn noted, “The conditions of injustice in [College Park] . . . [are] things that communities all over the United States have dealt with: the legacies of redlining, segregation, centuries of discrimination, occasionally brutal violence against people of color.” He focused on Lakeland, a historically Black neighborhood that suffered disinvestment, flooding, and harsh urban renewal policies. “Two-thirds of the residents were displaced by urban renewal in the 1970s and 1980s,” he noted, and student housing placed there instead. In 2020, Wojahn and his administration “committed . . . [to] pursuing restorative justice for the residents of Lakeland—the current residents as well as the people who were displaced.” Mayor Rhodes-Conway shared that “Madison and the community is deeply committed to justice, and deeply conflicted about what justice means.” She encouraged GSD students to consider the different ways that city staff can promote justice: “The racial equity work started, and is still primarily led by, city staff . . . people in public health, planning, finance.” These staff members, Rhodes-Conway stressed, are essential in “carrying [the work] through political transitions.” Addressing the enormous influence of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the disparities in which students choose to remain in the city after graduation, she explained, “There are marked differences in the demographics of who stays and who doesn’t.” She said the city needs to attract and retain Black professionals. Richmond’s history as the capital of the Confederacy, and its enduring legacy in the disparities between Black and white residents was highlighted by Mayor Stoney. “I have neighborhoods in my city that haven’t seen paving for 40 or 50 years. . . . That’s wrong, that’s not fair, and no one should have to live this way. . . . We could touch on so many topics: the lack of parks, the lack of trees, the lack of sidewalks.” Although Richmond’s five institutions of higher education have contributed to neighborhood change, they have also been integral to advocating for and pushing forward equity and justice conversations. “We are more intertwined as a community than we used to be,” Stoney explained.

A Call to Action

Community, justice, repair, and investment: these themes were central to how all seven mayors spoke of their cities. Their commitment reflects a quote from 2019 Loeb Fellow and former Vancouver City Council member Andrea Reimer that Griffin shared with the audience: “We may all have an identity that demands justice, but we also have an identity that demands participating in justice for others.” Griffin said, “This is the call to action that each of us can step into [and that] has motivated the mayors to be here.” Watch a recording of the event.

Seven GSD Alumni Elevated to AIA Fellows 2022

Nine GSD alumni and faculty have been elevated by the 2022 Jury of Fellows from the American Institute of Architects (AIA) to its prestigious College of Fellows. The honor recognizes architects who have “achieved a standard of excellence in the profession and made a significant contribution to architecture and society on a national level.”

The GSD congratulates:

• Prof. Ricardo A. Alvarez-Diaz AMDP ’20
• Mr. Hans-Ekkehard Butzer MArch ’99
• Kenneth Harold Luker MArch ’96 
• Prof. Kiel K. Moe  MDes ’03
• Mr. Anthony C. Poon  MArch ’92
• Mr. Steven Rajninger  MArch ’92  
• Mr. Mark P. Schendel  MArch ’89

The GSD also recognizes Associate Professor of Architecture Faculty member Mr. Eric Howeler was also selected as a fellow this year.

For the full list of 2022 Fellows, visit the AIA website .

Climate Migration: Latin America Prepares for an Increase in Environmental Refugees

Infrastructure, in conventional imaginations, exists as a tool of permanence: bridges, roads, sidewalks, and utilities are eternal public goods. Climate change has challenged that reality; extreme, less predictable climates have generated new discourses in adaptation and flexibility as core components of infrastructural resilience in the face of uncertain futures. Design Critics in Urban Planning and Design, Soledad Patiño and Felipe Vera are approaching the notion of adaptable, flexible infrastructure through the lens of climate-related migration. As researchers focused on vulnerable communities and environments in Latin America, their course, “Latin America in Transition: Imagining Infrastructures for Climatic Migration” is an opportunity for Harvard GSD students to explore potential systems and interventions that can prepare countries to receive an increasingly unpredictable flow of refugees. Migration, says Vera, isn’t new in this region, but Latin America is facing two distinct types of transitions: intensification of intra-regional flows, and compounding vulnerabilities. “If we look at the vulnerability profile of migrants, what we might find is that they used to be less vulnerable. Migrants used to move across the continent for aspirational reasons—to find better jobs or education. But today, what we’re seeing more and more is that migration has become a forced migration,” he says. Climate disasters, such as increased flooding or drought that in turn impact food security, sanitation, and health, will certainly increase the numbers of those seeking refuge; the World Bank predicts that more than 140 million people will be displaced by climate change by 2050. The hunger and low income and other layers of hardship experienced by migrants exacerbate their vulnerability. This, says Vera, is contextualized in a region that is in flux; it requires a greater number of cities to absorb more people. Those cities, Vera and Patiño explain, are not prepared. “Migration today and in the near future will be a great challenge for cities because it’s very easy to accommodate a migrant flow that comes incrementally, but when it comes suddenly, then you have resistance from the communities. And there are a series of challenges that infrastructure, services, and institutions are unable to address,” says Vera. Patiño (MAUD ’20), an Argentinian architect and urbanist, has studied and published on issues surrounding extraction and urbanization in Latin America and sanitation infrastructures in Mumbai; Vera (MDes ’13), a Chilean architect, urbanist, and leader of the Integration of Vulnerable Neighborhoods Program, has focused on urban design and planning, migration, and ecology in vulnerable contexts. Their course will generate speculative design strategies using their research, data analysis, case studies, and the expertise of guest lecturers. “The main goal of this studio is to provide the space to speculate about what will be required to create adaptable infrastructure to integrate migrants into the city and also to reduce their environmental vulnerability,” explains Patiño. The studio is focused on four different cities and settlements within Chile, a country has experienced a great influx of migrants. According to Vera, in 1990, only three percent of people living in informal settlements in Chile were migrants. In 2019, 30 percent of residents of informal settlements were migrants. Students have been developing extreme weather climate scenarios for 2050, moving to the city and settlement scale in order to analyze risk. Then, students define “domains of engagement,” says Patiño, which allows them to determine the scale of intervention projects required; some will be architecture or urban design projects, but all will deal with tackling climate risks. Students are working across issue areas, including heat, fire, and the lack of water, as well as coastal cities’ risks from rising seas, and analyzing what Vera calls “wetness”—the changes in quantity of water in different formats around the city. Much of the students’ research comes from risk atlases and demographic studies, but Vera and Patiño have also invited representatives from Chile’s Ministry of Housing and Urban Development to help prepare students to work at both the settlement and state levels. “That duality is very interesting because you see who is making the decisions on the one side, but at the same time you’re able to address them with people that have to put their hands on the ground and do things and make things happen,” says Vera. Generating these types of design speculations is challenging, however, as climate change makes the weather increasingly less predictable. Studies into migratory impacts show that foresight into the movement of people in response to climate disasters is “fuzzy,” says Vera. And according to the 2022 Intergovernmental Report on Climate Change, “Climate-related migration is expected to increase, although the drivers and outcomes are highly context specific and insufficient evidence exists to estimate numbers of climate-related migrants now and in the future.” As a result, flexibility becomes key in students’ designed interventions and presents an opportunity to rethink the normative understanding of static infrastructure. “We design permanent infrastructure, but when you have migration, you have to design for flux. And designing for flux really challenged us to think about infrastructure in another way,” says Vera. “We have to think of the way in which migrants will move across a territory; we’ll have to consider what are those infrastructures, both physical and social, that have to deal with migrants in bordered conditions within the recipient communities?” The emphasis on flexibility in these speculative proposals for climate migrant infrastructure allows cities and regions to prepare for the movement of people, but it also reframes the problems with migrants and refugees as a part of a process. “It is important to think of environmental immigration, not only as a shock and compulsive displacement of people, but also as processes,” says Patiño. “For example, we are talking with students about the effects of agricultural disruption and how this is framing new forms of migration within cities and countries, because land is becoming less productive. So we should also be thinking about migration as part [of] these processes. The shift from perceiving climate migration as a “shock” toward seeing it as a process could also help communities receiving migrants adjust socially, making migrants a more welcome force for positive change. Patiño and Vera are providing a space for careful synthesis of data, information, and knowledge about climate migration to equip students with tools and strategies not only to design civic infrastructure that can adapt to uncertain futures, but also to ensure a more just and equitable world. “​​If we anticipate correctly, migration is an opportunity,” says Vera. “There is a lot of research about how, when cities are prepared to properly absorb migration, migration is a driver for economic prosperity, for multicultural environments. If we don’t do the work well, we will lose the opportunity to have migration as a driver for development and growth.”

Nina Sayles (MUP/ MPH ’22): Making field to table work regionally

Nina Sayles spent five months of COVID isolation at her parents’ place in New Hampshire. An avid gardener, Sayles took advantage of the time to expand their garden — perhaps, she admits, a bit more than they need, now that she’s back on campus. After she graduates in May, Sayles wants to expand the garden for the rest of us, too. Sayles has been exploring the intersection of community health and agriculture in a dual-degree program at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Graduate School of Design. While the modern industrial food system has worked wonders feeding the world, its flaws have also become apparent: excess resource use, narrowing of varieties, foods — both fresh and processed — selected for shelf life and stability during transport rather than taste and nutrition. Continue reading Sayles’s profile on the Harvard Gazette website. Read more profiles from the GSD Class of 2022.

Shaping Contemporary Indigenous Design: An interview with Sam Olbekson

Sam Olbekson is committed to improving the lives of Native Americans. An Indigenous architect with more than 25 years of experience in community-oriented projects, he has made it his life’s mission to imbue justice and equity into every one of his design endeavors. “Otherwise, what is the real reason we’re even doing this?” Olbekson said during a recent interview over Zoom. The pioneering architect and alumnus of the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s MAUD program, believes the graduate school greatly influenced his ability to foresee the potential effects of his work on communities. He explained, “Going to the GSD, we’ve had such an opportunity—most in the world don’t have—to think about the impact of the built environment on people. With that extreme opportunity, I think comes a whole lot of responsibility. To bring back a sense of care for the world, care for our neighbors, and our environment.” Ahead of his upcoming lecture at the GSD, “Culture, Community, and Environmental Justice in Contemporary Indigenous Design,” Olbekson spoke about his Native upbringing, the importance of putting justice into practice, and the profound value he ascribes to grassroots community engagement. How does your Native upbringing inform your approach to architecture? I grew up mostly in the urban area here in South Minneapolis, the Phillips neighborhood, which is a very mixed neighborhood, but there’s a large Indigenous population. I also lived in two different reservations in northern Minnesota: White Earth Reservation and East Lake. Going back and forth between urban inner-city Indigenous settings versus the reservation and tribal and rural settings allowed me to see extremes. It was very eye-opening. And I was always very community-oriented. The Native population here, the mentors, teachers, all gave me a sense of value, of eventually returning to my community and doing good for it. Architecture was a way for me to come back and impact, not only individual buildings but also communities and neighborhoods. Did you have a preference between rural and urban environments? I loved that nomadic lifestyle. It was a way for me to have this adventurous lifestyle of being in the city and having the amenities and the things to do. But I also love nature. I love being out in the forest by myself and being out on the lakes. When I design for each environment, I think, What can I bring about urban communities—the density, walkability, transportation, the ability to live close to your neighbors—to rural areas? But also, How can I bring nature into the city—the experience of having clean air, light, and water? You’ve said before that justice and equity are part of any architecture worth doing. How have you translated this into your work? One way is by branching outside of the traditional role of the architect or urban designer. Doing a lot of community engagement and facilitating discussions within communities, to hear voices from a grassroots level that approach design not as an elitist, professional expert [viewpoint] that can come in and solve your problems, but as one who comes to a community, hears the goals and needs of the real people who live there, and allows space for them to be the designers and shapers of their community. In a lot of the work I do, I always make sure there’s a discussion about who benefits and who has the opportunity to own land. Are there opportunities for BIPOC businesses to be part of a project? Because, oftentimes, it’s the large developer that will have the resources or funds to swoop in, buy a property, and dictate what happens on a site. But working with communities, jurisdictions, cities, and organizations focused on promoting equitable development can give a much stronger sense of meaning to a city or neighborhood. In your upcoming lecture at the GSD, you’re set to highlight Native American projects challenging the status quo of tribal design. Can you share a few examples? I’ll share some specific examples during the lecture, but, in general, for the first time in 500 years, Indigenous communities can control the design of our community. That’s an incredibly powerful position to be in. For the first 500 or so years of colonial contact, there’s a difficult story of loss of land, stealing of land, murder, and an attempt by the government to exterminate entire races of people. It’s only been in the last 20 years or so that tribal communities have gained the resources to design from within their communities, to have a say in what’s happening. So the urban design, planning, and community-building work that I do is all part of a new way of asserting self-determination and sovereignty. Are there any projects you’re currently working on that you’re particularly excited about? In Minneapolis, I’ve been working for over 10 years on a community-building project called the American Indian Cultural Corridor. In the 1940s and ’50s, there were government-sponsored programs that tried to bring people off reservations and into cities. In part, the motivation was to assimilate people into Western society. The reality of it was there weren’t the jobs that were promised. In Minneapolis, a lot of Native people moved to the Phillips neighborhood, and then over the years, it was a very strong, urban Native American community. But without resources or jobs, it became very dilapidated, and over the past 15 to 20 years the urban Native community here has been a designated area called the American Indian Cultural Corridor. We’re trying to revitalize it from the perspective of community building. Not only are we building social services, but we’re building healthcare facilities and mixed-use development. This idea of what an urban Native American community can be is what’s really exciting to me. *This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Frida Escobedo MDes ’12 selected to realize new Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Wing at the MET

Frida Escobedo MDes ’12 has been selected to realize the vision for the Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The project will encompass a full reimagining of the current modern and contemporary galleries, which The Met has been seeking to revamp for more than a decade, creating 80,000 square feet of galleries and public space. The cost of the renovation is estimated to be $500 million. Escobedo established her eponymous studio in Mexico City in 2006. Her practice operates across a wide array of scales and mediums, from buildings and experimental preservation projects to temporary installations and public sculpture, limited-edition objects, publications, and exhibition design. Escobedo was chosen following a comprehensive international search and will be the first woman to design a wing at The Met.

From the Met’s press release : “The new wing will be a vibrant, exhilarating space that meets The Met’s current and future needs while promoting a lively representation and reevaluation of the art of the 20th and 21st century in the context of 5,000 years of art history,” said Max Hollein, Marina Kellen French Director of The Met. “Frida Escobedo is an outstanding architect of our time. In her practice, she wields architecture as a way to create powerful spatial and communal experiences, and she has shown dexterity and sensitivity in her elegant use of material while bringing sincere attention to today’s socioeconomic and ecological issues. Already through her partnership, Frida has demonstrated her vision to create enthralling galleries that will challenge the embedded hierarchies of our history and chart a more accessible trajectory for the new wing.”

For more from the New York Times on this announcement, please visit here.

For more information on Frida Escobedo, please visit her website .