Cultivating Shade: Policy, Planning, Design, and Activism for Geneva’s Urban Forest is a research seminar report from the Spring 2025 semester at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

The Cultivating Shade research seminar engaged the subject of the urban forest master plan as a tool for transformative change—change that is ecological as well as cultural. Taught in the department of landscape architecture it sought to leverage the increasing availability of spatially and temporally specific data to envision site specific, culturally grounded, and spatially coherent design solutions that protect, enhance, and enlarge the urban forest. We brought design thinking to systems-scale challenges, and used the tools designers know best, the case study, scenario planning, and the prototype, to ground our methodology.

Geneva is an ideal city for this effort. It already has an incredibly deep and rich catalog of geospatial information, it has for generations been thoughtful about its planning and has always seen landscape systems as a critical part of the city fabric, and it has many parties committed to enhancing the urban forest in the name of climate resilience and social equity. This research seminar is paired with a design studio taught in Fall 2025.

This seminar and studio were made possible thanks to the generous support of Fondation La Gara , located in Geneva.

In addition to Eric Kramer, the teaching team included Max Piana, Slide Kelly, Melanie Louterbach, and Anita Berrizbeitia.

Read this report on Issuu . Lire le rapport en Français (à venir).