Dana McKinney White
Dana McKinney White is a licensed architect and urban designer, who is an outspoken advocate for social justice and equity through design. She contextualizes people and their broader communities throughout her work. Her academic and professional work integrates wellness, policy, and economics into innovative design solutions to benefit even the most vulnerable populations including system-impacted communities, persons experiencing homelessness, and aging populations.
Dana co-founded enFOLD Collective in 2021 with Megan Echols, a fellow GSD alumna. enFOLD, an interdisciplinary architecture, planning, and design practice positions community voices at the center of its projects. The collective is committed to producing work rooted in site specificity, community needs, and the histories of the people who made that place. Dana also established Studio KINN where she consults on considerations of social justice, equity, abolition, and narratives of place.
Dana graduated from Princeton University summa cum laude with a A.B. in Architecture and Certificates in Urban Studies and Spanish and completed her Master in Architecture and Master Urban Planning, both with Distinction at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. During Dana’s time at the GSD, she co-established the inaugural Black in Design Conference, Map the Gap, and the African American Design Nexus. She subsequently worked at Gehry Partners where she focused on the LA River Master Plan, Southeast Los Angeles Cultural Center, the Rio Hondo Confluence Area Project, and other river-related projects. During her time at Gehry Partners, Dana assisted in Frank Gehry’s Yale School of Architecture studio, “The Future of Prison” and served as an advocate and researcher in Impact Justice’s review of the Finish and Norwegian criminal justice system.
Prior to joining the faculty of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Dana served as a development manager at Adre, a purpose-driven real estate development company located in Portland, Oregon that strives to uplift the region’s Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) through spatial equity. During her time at Adre, she helped to secure more than $8.2 million in grants to develop affordable office space at the Building United Futures Complex and the Williams & Russell project. Dana also served as a lecturer at the University of Maryland School of Architecture in their undergraduate architecture degree program.
In 2018, Dana was awarded the Norman Foster Foundation Traveling Fellowship for the “On Cities” Workshop located in Madrid, Spain, where she participated in an international design charette and symposium to develop novel urban design strategies to better integrate emerging technologies. Dana previously served on the USC Architecture Guild Board, the 2021 Monterey Design Conference Planning Committee, and Materials & Applications Programming Board.
Grace La
Grace La is Professor of Architecture, Chair of the GSD’s Department of Architecture, former Chair of the Practice Platform, and former Director of the Master of Architecture Programs. She is also Principal of LA DALLMAN Architects, internationally recognized for the integration of architecture, engineering and landscape.
Cofounded with James Dallman, LA DALLMAN is engaged in catalytic projects of diverse scale and type. Noted for works that expand the architect’s agency in the civic recalibration of infrastructure, public space and challenging sites, LA DALLMAN was named as an Emerging Voice by the Architectural League of New York in 2010 and received the Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence Silver Medal in 2007. In 2011, LA DALLMAN was the first practice in the United States to receive the Rice Design Alliance Prize, an international award recognizing exceptionally gifted architects in the early phase of their career. LA DALLMAN has also been awarded numerous professional honors, including architecture and engineering awards, as well as prizes in international design competitions.
LA DALLMAN’s built work includes the Kilbourn Tower, the Miller Brewing Meeting Center (original building by Ulrich Franzen), the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) Hillel Student Center, the Ravine House, the Gradient House and the Great Lakes Future and City of Freshwater permanent science exhibits at Discovery World. The Crossroads Project transforms infrastructure for public use, including a 700-foot-long Marsupial Bridge, a bus shelter and a media garden. LA DALLMAN is currently commissioned to design additions to the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts (original building by Harry Weese and landscape by Dan Kiley), the 2013 Master Plan for the Menomonee Valley and the Harmony Project, a 100,000-square-foot hybrid arts building for professional dance, which includes a ballet school, a university dance program and a medical clinic. The National Endowment for the Arts awarded the Harmony Project a grant in support of the design process in 2012.
LA DALLMAN’s work has been featured in many publications including Architect, a+t, Architectural Record, Azure, Praxis and Topos, as well as in books released by Princeton Architectural Press and Routledge. Architect profiled the firm’s design culture in June, 2012. LA DALLMAN’s work has been widely exhibited, including at the Heinz Architectural Center in the Carnegie Museum of Art. La is coeditor and author of Skycar City (Actar, 2007), featuring the inaugural Marcus Prize Studio, which was exhibited at the 2008 Venice Biennale. She is also the cofounder and three-time editor of UWM’s Calibrations and a member of the editorial board of the Journal for Architectural Education.
Previously, La served as a faculty member in the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at UWM, receiving tenure in 2005. She served as the Chair of the Planning and Coordinating Committee, where she led efforts in the department’s strategic planning, curriculum reform and hiring initiatives. La also served as a Design Critic in Architecture at the GSD (2010) and a Visiting Critic at Syracuse University (2011). She has delivered lectures at prestigious universities and cultural institutions including the New Museum in New York City, the National Building Museum in Washington DC and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.
La’s teaching, research and prototype design work were funded by KI, exhibited at Discovery World, and featured in the annual Metropolis Conference at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (2010). Demonstrating a unique ability to link the profession and the academy, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture has bestowed La with four Faculty Design Awards, which honor outstanding projects that advance the reflective nature of practice and teaching. Additionally, she has received numerous teaching awards including the 2005 UWM Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award.
La is a member of the United States General Services Administration (GSA) National Registry of Peer Professionals (class of 2010), which is comprised of the nation’s most distinguished private sector leaders in art, design, engineering and construction. She has also served as an adjudicator for the National Endowment for the Arts, the US Artists Fellowship and several AIA Design Awards Programs.
Grace La received her professional Master of Architecture with thesis distinction from the GSD, winning the Clifford Wong Housing Prize. She graduated with an AB, magna cum laude, from Harvard College in Visual and Environmental Studies.
Niall Kirkwood
“My subject is technology in landscape architecture and its relationship to design.
A professional landscape architect makes a landscape through the natural and constructed landscape medium across the territorial scale to that of individual sites. Landscape architects act deliberately and imaginatively through tactile and material physical design, therefore technology (emerging and traditional) is the most important subject in the discipline of landscape architecture and central to education and professional practices.
The topics of my research, teaching, publishing and design practice include the global post-industrial landscape and innovations in regenerating brownfields, superfund sites, landfills, extraction and mining lands and remediation techniques for polluted air, water, soils and sediments. More recently this has focused on aspects of land retreat, urbanization, flooding, phytoremediation techniques, waste legacies and themes of community and environmental justice.”
I am engaged with landscapes and sites, domestically and internationally that most designers avoid because these places are too damaged, risky, polluted and ultimately too difficult. This is where the work of landscape architecture is most relevant in the 21st century and where true imagination and beauty can lie”.
Niall Kirkwood, FASLA, AAAS, is the Charles Eliot Research Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) where he has taught and carried out research, publishing and consulting since joining the faculty in 1991. He retired as a full-time faculty member in July 1, 2025, and moved to become a research professor at the GSD. He was educated and licensed as a professional landscape architect and architect in the United Kingdom and as a professional landscape architect in the United States. From 2003-2009, he was the thirteenth Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture, the oldest such program in North America, founded in 1901 by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and Arthur Shurcliff. From 1999-2003 and 2005-2007, he was Director of the Master’s in Landscape Architecture Degree Programs (MLA), and from 1999-2003, he was the coordinator of the “Design and Environment” track of the Master in Design Studies Program (MDes). He served as the GSD Associate Dean for Academic Affairs from 2019 to 2024 and was an elevated as member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) in 2024.
Kirkwood has served as Chairman of the GSD Faculty Review Board and Academic Misconduct Panel and has served as a faculty member of the Harvard Medical School Center for Health and the Global Environment, the Harvard University Center for the Environment and a member of the faculty steering committee of The Harvard Global Health Institute. He served as the GSD representative on Harvard University’s Title IX Policy Review Advisory Committee and the Vice Provost for Advanced Learning’s (VPAL) Planning Council.
Externally, he has served as a member of the Advisory Board and External Examiner, Landscape Architecture Program, School of Architecture, Hong Kong University, External Examiner, Landscape Architecture Program, University of Toronto, a member of the On-Site External Examiners Review Committee to the School of Landscape Architecture, Beijing Forestry University, Beijing, China, a member of External Examiners, Landscape Architecture Program, School of Architecture, Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico, a member of Visiting Curriculum Committee to University of Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico and is currently a Beijing Foreign High-Level Talent Scholar at Tsinghua University (2024- 2025)
Kirkwood holds courtesy academic appointments including Distinguished Visiting Professor, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, Visiting Professor , International Program in Design and Architecture (INDA), Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, Founding Professorship and Dean of Landscape Architecture, School of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Beijing University (BUCEA), Beijing, China, and is a Member of Academic Advisory Board of Beijing Advanced Innovation Center of Urban Design for Future Cities, Beijing, China. During Spring 2010 he was on sabbatical at Korea University, Seoul, Republic of Korea as a Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture. During Fall 2017, he was on sabbatical at Smith College, Northampton, MA. in the Landscape Studies Program as the William Allen Neilson Visiting Professor and during Fall 2024, he was on sabbatical at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, International Program in Design and Architecture, (INDA) as a Visiting Professor.
Kirkwood is currently a Member of International Editorial Board of Landscape Architecture Journal (2025- 2029) Editor of Nakhara: Journal of Environmental Design and Planning Bangkok, (2025-present), Deputy Editor in Chief of Landscape Architecture Journal (2020-2024), He was formerly Advisory Editor, (2015-2020, Beijing, China) was formerly Editor-in Chief of Nakhara: Journal of Environmental Design and Planning (2015-2018, Bangkok, Thailand), Managing Editor, Worldscape Magazine, Chief Editor, RISE Journal (2015- present, Seoul, Korea). His essays and articles on design research, practice, and teaching have been published in Landscape Architecture Magazine (USA), Landscape (UK), Journal of Chinese Landscape Architecture, Landscape Architecture Korea, Business World India, City Planning Review: Journal of City Planning Institute of Japan, Landscape Architecture Journal (China), Eco City and Green Building Journal, Landscape Record, China, Worldscape (China),Environment and Landscape Architecture of Korea, Urban Space Design (China), and Harvard Design Magazine.
He was elected a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects (FASLA) in 2009 and is an honorary Fellow of the Kew Guild, The Royal Gardens at Kew, England also in 2009. He was recognized for his global leadership in post-industrial regeneration and brownfields by an honorary Doctor of Science (DSc.) from the University of Ulster, Belfast, Northern Ireland in 2009.
He was elected a Member of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and Architectural Registration Council of the United Kingdom (ARCUK) in 1978, an Associate Member of the Institute of Landscape Architects, United Kingdom (ILA) in 1988, a Member of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) in 1989 and was made a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects (FASLA) in 2009.
The scope of Kirkwood’s teaching, research, publishing and landscape consulting practice all emphasize a broader understanding of current and emerging technologies from landscape and environmental engineering, and how this understanding can best result in more creative and progressive design work in the fields of landscape architecture and planning and urban planning and design.
Kirkwood teaches core and option landscape design studios and offers lecture courses, workshops and seminars about design and aspects of technology in Landscape Architecture, Planning and Design.
Option design studios include: GSD 1413 Bangkok Remade: Design to Enhance Social Dignity, Climate Resilience, and Inspire the Nation’s Imagination in the Contemporary Thai Landscape, (2023) co-taught with Kotchakorn Voraakhom, GSD 1408 Ottawa County Remade: Toxic Transformations, Environmental Justice and Design Imagination, Ottawa County, North-East Oklahoma, USA (2022), GSD 1409 Tar Creek Remade: Environmental Legacies and Re-Imagining the Future of the Tar Creek Superfund Site, Tri-State Mining District, Ottawa County, Oklahoma, USA (2021), GSD 1408 Thailand Remade: The Lower Chao Phraya Flood Plain, Pathum Thani and the Technological Imagination, (2020) co-taught with Kotchakorn Voraakhom, GSD 1407 Fieldwork: Brexit, Borders and Imagining a New City-Region for the Irish Northwest (2019), co-taught with Gareth Doherty, GSD 1407 Korea Remade: Alternate Nature, DMZ and Hinterlands (2018) co-taught with Jungyoon Kim and Yoonjin Park, GSD 1409 Ulsan Remade: Manufacturing the Modern Industrial City- The Case of Ulsan, Republic of Korea, (2017), co-taught with Francesca Benedetto, GSD 1406 Seoul Remade: Design of the ‘Kool’ and the Everyday- Regeneration of the EBS District, Gangnam, Seoul, Republic of Korea (2016), GSD 1401 Mumbai Metropolitan: Adapting the Township Lands, Mumbai, India (2008) co-taught with Nazneen Cooper, GSD 1402 Mumbai Margins: Rethinking the Island City, Mumbai, India (2007) co-taught with Nazneen Cooper, GSD1402 Maximum Mumbai, Minimum Mumbai: Repositioning the Cotton Textile Mill Lands, Girangaon, Central Mumbai, India (2006), co-taught with Nazneen Cooper, GSD 1404 Altered Faces: Reworking the Teheran Corridor, Seoul, Korea (2004), co-taught with Alistair McIntosh, and GSD 1403 Motor City Landscapes: Detroit Riverfront (1999) co-taught with Mary Margaret Jones.
Landscape Core studio courses have included: GSD 1211 Landscape Architecture III and GSD 1211 Planning and Design of Landscapes
Lecture courses have included:GSD 6242 Ecologies, Techniques, Technologies IV, GSD 6323 Brownfield Practicum: Regeneration and Reuse of Brownfield Lands, GSD 6219 Plants and Technology II, GSD 6206 Landscape Technology, GSD 6442 Rebuilding Devastated Environments: Sustainable Landscape Development in the 21st Century, GSD 6304 Site-works, GSD 6303 Site Planning and GSD 2103 Drawing the Landscape.
Seminar courses have included: GSD 6454 Poetics of Landscape Construction, GSD 9108PHYTO Remediation and Rebuilding Technologies in the Landscape, GSD 9206 Mumbai Matters: Assembling Urban India, GSD 9206 Reimagining India: A New Urban Enterprise? GSD 3501 MLA IAP/MLA II Landscape Architecture Professional Seminar, GSD 6323 Brownfields: Sustainable Redevelopment of Brownfield Sites in Dorchester and East Boston, MA, GSD 6400 Landfill Enduse: Freshkills Landfill Regeneration, Staten Island, NY, GSD 6440 Land Reclamation and Remediation Technologies, GSD 6323 Advanced Seminar on Landscape Technology: Brownfields, GSD 6323 Manufactured Sites: Rethinking the Post-Industrial Landscape.
Professor Kirkwood studies technology and its relationship to landscape architecture through a series of research topics including the reuse of former industrial and polluted land, site remediation technologies, urban landscape planning and design, landscape reclamation, landscape detail design, traditional and emerging construction technologies and on-going weathering and durability of built landscapes related to climate change. He is a leading academic internationally in the field of site remediation, regeneration and recovery across a range of geographies, countries and scales of landscape. Areas of specific focus include mining extraction sites, urban and rural brownfields, waste landfills, the regeneration of superfund sites (USA), decommissioned military bases, closed manufacturing facilities and the invention and production of remade land using applied remediation technologies.
He is the co-founder with Professor Xiaodi Zheng of the Center for Brownfield Research at Tsinghua University, Beijing, P.R. China. He was also the founder and director of the Center for Environment and Technology (CTE), a research, advisory and executive education initiative located at the GSD. The CTE (1997-2017) focused on site analysis, remediation, sustainable reclamation issues, emerging landscape materials and educational design outreach in North America, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Research projects included: Expo 2106 ‘City and Nature’ Regeneration Site Design, Tangshan, China; Urban Ireland: The City of Belfast as a Laboratory of Change; Dongchun New Town Housing Landscape, Korea; Hanam Misa Housing Landscape, Seoul, Korea; Post-mining reclamation strategies for the Pingshuo Mining Company, Shanxi, China; Vertical and Horizontal Moss Panel Surface Technologies with Il Song Landscape Research, Seoul, Korea; Strategies for development of the DMZ National Forest- ‘Forest of Peace’ for Ministry of Forestry, Korea; Zinc Smelting Plants Reuse in Monterrey and Chihuahua, Mexico with Grupo Diseno Urbano, Mexico City; Hiriya Landfill Reuse and Ayalon Park, Tel Aviv for District Planning Office, Tel Aviv and Beracha Foundation; Research on the low carbon city for the Mayor’s Office, Metropolitan Region of Seoul, Korea, an analysis and report on U-Eco Cities, for the Korea Institute of Construction & Transportation Technology Evaluation and Planning (KICTEP) and collaboration with MK Singh, (Delhi) and Samsung C&T Corporation, Engineering and Construction Group on sustainable design and development in Mumbai.
Prior to joining the Harvard faculty Kirkwood worked in private design offices in Scotland, UK, London, England, UK and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA carrying out urban land reclamation, landscape architectural design, urban architecture, and development projects in Europe, Middle East, and the U.S.A. These included Ardeer Quarry Restoration, and Saltcoats Landfill Reclamation, Ayrshire, Scotland, Canary Wharf, Phases 1- 3, London Docklands UK, Hotel del Artes, Vila Olimpica, Barcelona, Spain, Parc de le Draga, Banyoles, Spain, Kings Cross Redevelopment, London, UK. Chiswick Park, London, UK, Royal Albert Docks, London Docklands, Bishopsgate and Ludgate Developments, City of London, UK, Wexner Center, OSU Campus, Columbus, Ohio, the British Embassy and Chancellery, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and Colfes School Arts Center, Barnes, London, UK.
He was a project architect with the Office of Derek Lovejoy & Partners, Landscape Architects and Planners (now DLP), Edinburgh, Scotland and Trevor Dannatt & Partners, London, UK. He also worked as a senior associate of the landscape architecture office, Hanna/Olin Ltd, Philadelphia (now The Olin Studio, Inc.) consulting with the design offices of Eisenman and Robertson, New York, Foster Associates, London, UK, Richard Rogers Partnership, London, UK, Ove Arup & Partners, London, UK. Office of Frank O. Gehry, Los Angeles, Aldo Rossi, Milan. Italy, David Chipperfield, London, UK, Eric Parry, London, SOM, Chicago and London UK.
In addition Kirkwood has consulted for Weston & Sampson, Boston, MA (2016), Group Han, Seoul, Republic of Korea, (2014- present), Eastwood Design Company, Beijing, P.R. China (2006-2010), the Clean Land Fund, Rhode Island (2005-2012), District Planning Office, Tel Aviv and Beracha Foundation on Hiriya Landfill, (2001), Fresh Kills Regeneration Professional Advisory Forum, (2001), City of New York Department of City Planning on Freshkills Landfill (1999-2001), and US EPA Region 1, New England (2000).
Stephen Gray
On leave for Spring 2026
Stephen Gray is an urban designer, educator, and principal of Grayscale Collaborative , a research and design firm focused on spatial justice and equitable development. He is an Associate Professor of Urban Design and Director of the Urban Design Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Stephen’s research, teaching, and practice examine how race, capital, and infrastructure intersect to shape cities—and are anchored by two core commitments: (1) foregrounding the systems and ideologies of power that have historically and continuously shaped the field of urban design; and (2) developing principles and methods for a practice that not only engages power more critically, but also envisions cities as places where more people can exercise agency over their own futures. His work connects theory to practice, linking design to the political and economic systems that structure urban life, and has been nationally recognized by the AIA and ASLA, professional associations in both architecture and landscape architecture.
Through his practice, Stephen leads and collaborates on community-engaged urban design projects across the country, with particular focus on Boston. His writing and advocacy which are more contextually broad, reject the notion of space as a neutral backdrop to political life, arguing instead that it is actively produced through power-laden social relations—often manifesting as racialized territorial inequality. Whether co-leading World Bank–sponsored research on resilience in the Philippines; co-founding the Global Design Initiative for Refugee Children (GDIRC) to support displaced youth in Lebanon; co-leading the Boston Race and Space project as part of the Harvard Mellon Initiative Urban Intermedia: City, Archive, Narrative; or developing the widely used Community First Toolkit with the Urban Institute—Stephen’s work surfaces embedded power dynamics and advances strategies to expand access, agency, and opportunity for those most often excluded. He writes regularly for public audiences, including op-eds in Next City and The Boston Globe, and is a founding member of Dark Matter University , a decentralized network advancing equity in design education.
Notable academic and professional service includes appointments to the President’s Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery (H&LS); the Legacy of Slavery Memorial Project Committee; the Harvard University Committee on the Arts (HUCA); the Asia Center Council; and the University Design Advisory Pool. He serves on the board of the Emerald Necklace Conservancy and has advised initiatives such as the Just City Mayoral Fellowship and Boston’s Radical Imagination for Racial Justice grant program. Previously, he was Associate Director of the Boston Society of Architects (BSA), co-chaired Boston’s 100 Resilient Cities Resilience Collaborative, and contributed to several Urban Land Institute (ULI) Technical Assistance Panels.
Stephen has held teaching appointments at MIT-DUSP and Northeastern University and holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Cincinnati and a Master of Architecture in Urban Design (MAUD) with distinction from Harvard University, where he received both the Thesis Prize and the Award for Outstanding Leadership in Urban Design.
Jose A. Gomez-Ibanez
José A. Gómez-Ibáñez is the Derek C. Bok Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy, Emeritus at Harvard University, where he held a joint appointment at the Graduate School of Design and the John F. Kennedy School of Government. He taught courses in economics, infrastructure, and transportation policy in both schools.
Professor Gómez-Ibáñez research interests are in transportation, infrastructure and urban economic development, and infrastructure privatization and regulation.
At Harvard HKS, Professor Gómez-Ibáñez served as chair of the Kennedy School Social Policy Area and was faculty co-chair (with Professor Henry Lee) of the Infrastructure in a Market Economy executive program. He served as faculty chair of the Master in Urban Planning Program at the GSD (2001-2004), of the Master in Public Policy Program at the Kennedy School (1996-1998), of doctoral programs at the GSD (1992-1995), and of the Department of Urban Planning and Design at the GSD (1984-1988).
He is the author and editor of several books including:
Regulating Infrastructure: Monopoly, Contracts and Discretion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), author.
Going Private: The International Experience with Transport Privatization (Washington: The Brookings Institution, 1993), with John R. Meyer.
Regulation for Revenue: The Political Economy of Land Use Exactions (Washington: The Brookings Institution, 1993), with Alan A. Altshuler.
Competition in the Railway Industry: An International Comparative Analysis (Edward Elgar, 2006), edited with Gines de Rus; and
Essays in Transport Economics and Policy: A Handbook in Honor of John R. Meyer (Washington: The Brookings Institution, 1999), edited with William B. Tye and Clifford Winston.
Professor Gómez-Ibáñez received his A.B. in government from Harvard College in 1970 and his M.P.P. and Ph.D. in Public Policy from Harvard in 1972 and 1975, respectively.
Diane Davis
Diane E. Davis is the Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism and former Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD). She also is the director of the Mexican Cities Initiative at the GSD, and faculty chair of the committee on Mexico at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. Before moving to Harvard in 2012, Davis served as the head of the International Development Group in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, where she also was Associate Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning. Trained as a sociologist with an interest in cities in Latin America (BA in Geography, Northwestern University; Ph.D. in sociology, UCLA) Davis’s research interests include the relations between urbanization and national development, urban governance, urban social movements, and informality, with a special emphasis on Mexico.
Books include Cities and Sovereignty: Identity Conflicts in the Urban Realm (Indiana University Press, 2011); Discipline and Development: Middle Classes and Prosperity in East Asia and Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2004); Irregular Armed Forces and their Role in Politics and State Formation (Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century (Temple University Press 1994; Spanish translation 1999). Her recent research has focused on urban violence as well as spatial strategies to minimize risk and foster resilience in the face of these and other vulnerabilities.
She teaches classes on Urbanization and Development; Urban Governance and the Politics of Planning, SDGs in Theory and Practice; and Planning Theory and Praxis: Comparative and Historical Approaches. This April Davis was named a CIFAR Fellow and co-director (along with Simon Goldhill, Secretary of the British Academy and professor of History at Cambridge) of a five-year project titled “Humanity’s Urban Future.” With a focus on six cities around the world (Kolkata, Mexico City, Shanghai, Kinshasa, Naples, Toronto), and with the participation of historians, planners, anthropologists, geographers, and architects, this initiative interrogates how a `good urban life’ is conceptualized and produced.
Faculty Coordinator, Mexican Cities Initiative
Co-Chair, Faculty Committee on Mexico, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies
Executive Committee Member, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs
Advisory Board Member, Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative
CIFAR Fellow and Project Co-Director, 2023-2028, “Humanity’s Urban Future”
Faculty Affiliate, Bloomberg Center for Cities, Harvard University
Felipe Correa
Felipe Correa is Associate Professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Design and Director of the Urban Design Degree Program. A New York-based architect and urbanist, Correa works at the confluence of Architecture, Urbanism and Infrastructure. Through his design practice, Somatic Collaborative, he has developed design projects and consultancies with the public and private sector in multiple cities and regions across the globe, including Mexico City, New Orleans, Quito, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Seoul among many others.
Correa is the co-founder and director of the South America Project (SAP), a trans-continental applied research network that proactively endorses the role of design within rapidly transforming geographies of the South American Continent. SAP specifically focuses on how a spatial synthesis best afforded by design can provide alternative physical and experiential identities to the current spatial transformations reshaping the South American Hinterland. He recently published, Beyond the City: Resource Extraction Urbanism in South America (University of Texas Press). The volume examines the role of architecture and urban planning in the creation and administration of landscapes of intense resource extraction. Recently, Correa published Mexico City: Between Geometry and Geography (ARD Publishing 2014), a graphic biography of Mexico City.
Correa is also co-editor (with Bruno Carvalho) of Lateral Exchanges: Architecture, Urban Development, and Transnational Practices, a series published through the University of Texas Press that explores the role of Architecture and Urbanism in the context of International Development.
His design work, research, and writings have been published in journals, including Architectural Design, Architectural Record, Harvard Design Magazine, MONU, Ottagono, and PLOT among many others.
Correa has lectured and exhibited worldwide at many universities and conferences. Most recently at Columbia University, Cornell University, Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Ecuador, Tulane University, University of Pennsylvania, The National Arts Club of New York, and the Pan-American Architecture Biennale, among others. He received his Bachelor of Architecture degree from Tulane University, and his Master of Architecture in Urban Design from Harvard’s GSD.
Danielle Choi
Danielle Narae Choi is an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a licensed landscape architect. Her research examines landscape design as a cultural practice that synthesizes broader concerns of science, technology, and infrastructure.
Choi’s current research is an environmental study of 20th-century interior landscapes. A subset of public projects were volatile sites of negotiation between plant vitality and human comfort; colonial botany and situated traditional knowledge; new aesthetic agendas and entrenched urban crisis. Ongoing research investigates infrastructural breaches of continental divides in North America and their implications for the concept of genius loci in landscape architecture.
Choi’s writing has been published in the Journal of Architectural Education, Harvard Design Magazine, Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes, Landscape Architecture Magazine, and in the volume Fresh Water, edited by Mary Pat McGuire and Jessica Henson. A forthcoming essay, Landscape is. . . Labor will appear in the volume Landscape Is. . .!, edited by Gareth Doherty and Charles Waldheim.
Before her appointment at the GSD, Choi practiced professionally with Topotek in Berlin and Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA) in New York. As a senior associate at MVVA, she led the strategy and design of complex projects ranging in scale from gardens to parks to urban framework plans, leading large, multi-disciplinary teams. Choi draws upon this experience to examine the realms of knowledge, social relations, and labor required to produce (and that are produced by) living landscapes.
Choi holds a degree in art history from the University of Chicago and a Master in Landscape Architecture degree from the GSD, where she received the Jacob Weidenman award for excellence in design.
Pierre Bélanger
Pierre Bélanger is Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. In the Department of Landscape Architecture, Bélanger teaches and coordinates graduate courses at the intersection of ecology, infrastructure, media and urbanism in the interrelated fields of design, communications, planning and engineering. With a multimedia approach and cross-scalar approach to design in both research and practice, his core interests lie at the convergence of the study of territory, ecology, and power.
In response to the inertia of urban planning and the overexertion of civil engineering in public works today, Bélanger’s contribution to the field of “landscape infrastructure” has been shared and developed in collaboration with governments, professionals and academics worldwide. Vis-à-vis the complexities, magnitudes and indeterminacies of urban change, Bélanger’s core commitment lies in the agency of landscape architecture and the field of landscape to redefine the morphology of urban infrastructure and future of urban land in design, research, pedagogy and practice.
In addition to the recent publication of the 35th edition of the Pamphlet Architecture Series, GOING LIVE: From Models to Systems (Princeton Architectural Press, 2015), Bélanger has published two core books on infrastructure and urbanism including, LANDSCAPE AS INFRASTRUCTURE: A Base Primer (Taylor & Francis, 2016) and ECOLOGIES OF POWER: Countermapping the Military Geographies & Logistical Landscapes of the U.S. Department of Defense (MIT Press, 2016) co-authored with Alexander Arroyo. Dr. Bélanger’s work has been recognized by professional associations and scholars worldwide with publications in Journal of Landscape Architecture, Ecological Urbanism, New Geographies, Landscape Journal, Topos, The Landscape Urbanism Reader, Geoinformatics, Journal of Tunneling and Underground Space Technology, Trash, Food, and Canadian Architect. Bélanger’s recent editorial work includes Harvard Design Magazine Issue No.39 “Wet Matter” (Fall/Winter 2014) in collaboration with Jennifer Sigler, and recent publications include “Altitudes of Urbanization” (2016), “Out of Time” (2016), “Is Landscape Infrastructure” (2015), “The Alvsjø Flatbed” (2015), “Between the Tides of Apartheid” (2014), “Ecology 5.0” (2014), “Landscape Infrastructure: Urbanism Beyond Engineering” (2012), “The Agronomic Landscape” (2011), “Regionalization” (2010), “Redefining Infrastructure” (2010), “Power Perestroika” (2010), “Landscape as Infrastructure” (2009), “Landscapes of Disassembly” (2007), “Synthetic Surfaces” (2007), “Foodshed: The Cosmopolitan Infrastructure of the Ontario Food Terminal” (2007) and “Airspace: The Economy and Ecology of Landfilling in Michigan” (2006).
Bélanger has received several international prizes in design and planning competitions and he is only the Landscape Architect to have received the Professional Prix de Rome in Architecture and Curator’s Award for the Venice Architecture Biennale awarded by the Canada Council for the Arts, as well as the first landscape architect to author the Pamphlet Architecture Series since its founding in 1978.
Appointed National Curator of the Canadian Pavilion by the Canada Council for the Arts for the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, he is the first landscape architect ever to be selected for the venue of the Biennale since its creation in 1980. Titled, EXTRACTION, the project profiles Canada’s position as the preeminent extraction nation on the planet and its rise as global resource empire over the past 800 years since the creation of the Magna Carta in the Year 1215. Looking at fundamental issues of land, territory and power, the project examines the scales, sources, and systems of extraction that underlie the mineral media of contemporary urban life. The project has been profiled internationally in The Walrus, Border Crossings, The New York Observer, ArchDaily, and CBC Radio and will result in a book to be published by MIT Press, EXTRACTION EMPIRE, in Spring 2018.
As former Project Manager for Brinkman & Associates of Earth Partners LLC—the world’s largest reforestation and bioengineering contractor, Bélanger completed doctoral studies on infrastructural environments at the Life Sciences University of Wageningen (WUR, The Netherlands) with PhD cum laude, the first graduate from the School of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning to ever receive this distinction in Wageningen’s history since 1918. Prior to this, Bélanger completed graduate studies for the Master in Landscape Architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design where he received the Janet Darling Webel and Norman T. Newton Prizes in design. Originally trained at the University of Toronto under the tutelage of Dr. Detlef Mertins, George Baird and Robert Wright, Dr. Bélanger is professionally registered as a Landscape Architect in Canada and the United States, and as Urban Planner in the Netherlands.
Combining knowledge from different fields and media, Bélanger collaborates with government agencies, resource industries, civil authorities, professional organizations, universities, corporations and a team of interdisciplinary practitioners in the design and development of territorial strategies. Through the inception of OPSYS / Landscape Infrastructure Lab in 2006 (a federally incorporated, non-profit, design-research organization in Canada and the United States), Bélanger initiates and coordinates a portfolio of projects funded by public/private partnerships that include The World Bank Group, the Government of Haiti Civil Protection Service, the U.S. Department of Defense, Transport Canada, New York State, Charles River Conservancy, Foreign Affairs & International Trade Canada, the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council, the Toronto Region Conservation Authority, Jardin International de Métis, the Greater Toronto Airports Authority, Waste Management Inc., the City of Toronto, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.