THE NEAR-FUTURE CITY Final Review Booklet
Landscape Architecture Core IV STU 1212 Spring 2020 Harvard GSD
Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
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...The result of over determination is another paradox, namely that these frozen cities decay much more quickly than urban fabric inherited from the past. As uses change, buildings have to be replaced, since fixed form function relations make them so difficult to adapt; the average life span of new public housing in Britain is now forty years; the average life-span of new skyscrapers in New York is thirty five years. The over specification of form and function makes the modern urban environment a brittle place‌
To the scientist, open systems are familiar companions. Chance events, mutating forms, elements which cannot be homogenized or are not interchangeable all these disparate phenomena of the mathematical and/ or natural world can nonetheless form a pattern, and that assemblage is what we mean by an open system.
Richard Sennett*, The Open City (2004)
*RIchard Sennett is an urban theorist whose writings focus on labor practices and the social life in cities.
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Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
Course Abstract
‘ It doesn’t stop; every morning it begins all over again. One day, it’s rising water levels; the next, it’s soil erosion; by evening. It’s the glaciers melting faster and faster; On the 8pm news, between two reports on war crimes, we learn that thousands of species are about to disappear before they have even been properly identified. Every month, the measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are even worse than the unemployment statistics. Every year we are told that it’s the hottest since the first weather recording stations were set up; sea levels keep on rising’; the coastline is increasingly threatened by spring storms; as for the ocean, every new study finds it more acidic than before. This is what the press calls living in the era of an ‘ecological crisis. Alas, Talking about a ‘crisis’ would be just another way of reassuring ourselves, saying that ‘ this too will pass,’ the crisis ‘ will soon be behinds us. If only it were just a crisis! If only it had been just a crisis! The experts tell us we should be talking instead about a ‘ mutation’ : we were used to one world; we are now tipping and mutating into another. Facing Gaia, Bruno Latour, p. 7 This is the fourth and final semester for the core Landscape Architecture sequence. It questions ways in which we can design urban assemblages for the city during moments of deep and rapid transformation. The assemblages are explored as a basic “DNA” of the city in which urban, landscape and ecological elements are intertwined to imagine new ways of habitation for both human and non-human constituencies. The urban assemblage considers the city as comprised of multiple heterogeneous parts and networks, intertwined with the less tangible metabolic and material processes, that describe the nature of the city through its emergent and indeterminable characteristics. The assemblage is multi-scalar and subject to forces that range from the local to the global. The Near Future is now, very soon and not yesterday, nor somewhere in the inconceivable future. Thus, this studio on the “Near-Future City” seeks to explore new urban assemblages and paradigms for the city that address present inequities and insecurities (as well as predicted future ones) and are not solely dictated by market economies or singular political institutions and their values. This work on the Near-Future City explores multiple tensions and ways of living that question our current modes of habitation. This is an opportunity to speculate on a “Near-Future City” that considers the city as a thick ground condition, one that describes a set of complex systems characterized by gradients between the static and the dynamic. Through this thick ground, students will develop an understanding of the past and present city and how it can adapt to future conditions.
Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
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The “Near-Future City” designs will necessarily respond to the current and projected issues of climate change. These complex layered issues will be considered through strategies of adaptation and potential transformation of the assemblage and its DNA. Adaptation will be explored as both a strategy of immediate response and an ingrained code for ongoing modification. The semester is structured around three phases of work: 01. metabolic flows and material processes, 02. urban assemblages for the “Near-Future City,” and 03. deployment and disposition of the assemblages. The semester will begin by interrogating a particular set of systems at play in the urban environment and identifying key constituencies to be addressed. From here, the development and encoding of an urban assemblage is rigorously explored as an intertwined agglomeration of urban elements and systems. Finally, in the last phase, students negotiate the formation of their assemblages in a sector of Boston. Through this work, students will address one of the broader themes of the studio— mobility, habitation and supply chains—which together provide focused criteria through which we can tackle the key elements and systems of the “Near-Future City”.
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Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
Phases and Modules Structure
The studio is organized around three phases with five two- to three-week modules. The phases build upon each other. The work from the previous phases and modules will be updated and revised with new discoveries in the subsequent phases. The shorter introductory exercises, in the pre-term and first phase, focus on establishing familiarity with tools, workflows, site and knowledge of urban issues and case studies. The longer exercises, in phases two and three, tackle a specific theme in depth and are grounded in particular sites located in the Greater Boston region, which cover a range of pertinent issues relative to climate and the “Near-Future City.�.
Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
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Phase One: (Pre Spring Break) Agents, Agency, Metabolic Flows and Material Processes Phase One: Agents, Agency, Metabolic Flows and Material Processes will set the intellectual and spatial foundation for the subsequent work of the studio. We will begin by understanding the metabolic systems of the city, the key qualities of these systems and the agents responsible for their deployment. Through metabolism—or the processes that occur within an organism in order to sustain it—we can read the material and energy flows within a city. The metabolic model provides a framework to engage the natural and human systems intertwined in the urban environment. By understanding how people, materials and energy move into and out of the city, in multiple time cycles, it is possible to read the city dynamically through its various constituencies. These constituents, or agents, are the key entities operating in the urban realm. They are the for whom and by whom the city is made. Agents have the capacity to effect change, in other words, they have agency. To begin the design process, we will identify key systems, materials and agents operating both within the studio themes and across the studio sites. We will develop indexical tools to map, relate and synthesize these critical readings of urban processes. And we will use this understanding, to frame a polemic relative to the future climate and inhabitation of the city.
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Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
Phase Two: (Pre Spring Break) Urban Assemblage of the ‘Near Future City’ Phase Two Urban Assemblage of the “Near Future City” In this phase we will continue with the premise explored in Phase One to articulate and position it as the brief for the urban assemblage of the “Near-Future City.” We will continue to identify the agents and processes of material ecologies. For here, we will develop a project-specific catalogue of urban elements and their inherent principles and protocols for assembly, adaptation and mutation. Through the combination of proposed urban elements(s). we will develop a suite of urban assemblages that inherently articulate the “DNA” of the “Near-Future City.” The urban assemblage will be considered as a “thick ground” with tangible and intangible characteristics for responding to states of uncertainty at both the local and global scales. The assembly will be tested in different situations, and the resultant variations will form a matrix of building blocks for the city. The matrices developed will have morphological and performative characteristics that will be driven by principles drawn from an understanding of planning, urban design, engineering, ecology and market economies.
Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
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Phase Three: (Post Spring Break) Deployment and Disposition Phase Three: Deployment and Disposition will return to the project’s foundation, established in Phase One and ground this intellectual premise by deploying the urban assemblages from Phase Two on site. In deploying the assemblages, we will speculate on the potential spatial transformations of the physical site as well as the possible mechanisms required to bring a project to fruition. These include: regulatory parameters, political structures, economic and ecological systems and cultural constraints. Again, the studio addresses the “Near-Future City,� arguing that pressing climate concerns are not an issue of the future but rather one of the present, and that, in designing for these conditions, it is necessary to understand how present models for building the city must be re-tooled to create viable alternatives moving forward. Thus, the projects will be interrogated for their understanding of the how behind their potential fulfillment (who is responsible for the execution in all its dimensions). In developing this work, the ethics behind the designs will be foregrounded. Projects will tackle specific scenarios (social housing, community land trusts, commons) that place into critical question the current market-driven means for providing and evaluating spaces in the city.
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Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
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Review Structure Instructors: Rosalea Monacella & Belinda Tato
Session One: April 29 1:30p to 5:00p Reviewers: Charles Waldheim, Julia Czerniak, Ed Wall 1. Fabiana Casale, Yvonne Fang, Maria Ulloa 2. Angela Moreno-Long, Xin Feng, Jiani Zhangi 3. Eric Van Dreason, Natalie Khoo, Laura Lee Williams
Session Two: April 30 1:30p to 5:00p Reviewers: Lorena Bello, Michiel van Irsel, Francesca, Benedetto, Lenio Myrivili (@ 2:30p) 4. Tiangang Lyu, Wenyu Xue, Zihui Zhang 5. Matt Liebel, Annie Hayner, Sarah Doonan, Dominic Riolo 6. Tian Wei Li, Joanne Li, Sophia Xiao, Ying Zhang
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Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
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Transmission Right of Way Fabiana Casale, Yvonne Fang, Maria Ulloa Rosalea Monacella With the current transition in the way we fuel our cities, we acknowledge that alternative “sustainable” solutions continue to deplete the hinterlands through resource extraction. By reshaping the ways we live and consume within the city, we approach energy as emergy, an entity that accounts for feedback systems as well as metabolic flows. Situated in South Boston, Transmission Right of Way establishes a waste-to-resource conversion network that is facilitated by the ground and living systems. Our redefinition of Transmission Right of Way, as an ecological easement network, first emerged through synthesizing hinterland reform policy and electric grid guidelines. This project establishes a new commons that explores the possibility of carbon offset through an intra urban network of collective land ownership that gives residents the agency to choose their level of investment. This new Transmission Right of Way generates public power and resources, meaning that we are neither beholden to the power supplier monopoly nor are we profit-driven. Along with our design proposal, the project stipulates that residential and communal land-uses must make way for living energy infrastructure that ensures the community’s reliable resource and power supply as well as transmission. In our speculation of the post-carbon city, we cast urban form as a mutualistic system driven by expanded notions of spatial caring. This care comes from close encounters with land and ecological processes, altered relationships to consumption, and collective labor that engenders a living commons. This expanded care enables a new way of living that renounces energy as unilineal consumption and instead embraces the notion of emergy, in which we become accountable for all direct and indirect labor, costs, and sacrifices that support our existence. All in all, Transmission Right of Way is founded upon frank accountability, tenacious democracy, sincere institutional support, and above all, conscious love and care for absolutely everything that enables us to live aspirationally. Keywords: Hinterlands, Emergy, Commmons
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Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
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Reframing Performance Xin Feng, Angela Moreno-Long, Jiani Zhang Belinda Tato The intense commercial and housing development pressures in South Boston present an opportunity to rethink the production life cycle of the built environment and reframe the performance of the city through new embedded energies and localized material flows. The construction and demolition process, both in service of new development booms as well regular infrastructure maintenance, produced nearly 900,000 tons of waste in 2018 alone. Much of South Boston is being renovated at 1:1 scale with old structures being demolished and replaced with the exact same form but with new materials. As the city transforms, we cannot keep replicating the same forms along a linear production and waste cycle. The concrete industry serves as a case study of an abundant material in the neighborhood that acts as an interface between city infrastructure, environment and daily life. Through new material configurations of water collection systems, surface conditions, material processing and a shift from demolition to deconstruction the environmental and energy performance of the city is better suited to adapt to ongoing states of renewal. With a change in how we think about construction and more careful attention to the embodied energy of the city, new hierarchies of publicness and material interfaces emerge in response to material transformations. Incremental change in line with the lifespan and states of renewal of different infrastructure in the city aims to localize material flows and embedded a new identity in the city. Keywords: Reuse, Reframe, Reinvent
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Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
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Tending to Ground Eric Van Dreason, Lauralee Williams, Natalie Khoo Rosalea Monacella The current Green New Deal recognizes improvements to transit strictly according to carbon-emission, energy-efficiency and vehicular modernization, allowing current modes of capital accumulation by private actors to continue unabated. We are proposing a societal shift away from existing, single-use transit infrastructure and towards a set of multifunctional spaces where we prioritize the collective, and in that, the recognition of labor done by all living things in socio-ecological solidarity. Our manifesto proposes to subvert words commonly associated with our current economic and political system and to redefine them as five essential Forms of Care: Growth, Production, Efficiency, Commodity and Resource. We imagine these to be undertaken by both humans and non-humans as the means by which we begin to recast the transit system as connective tissue in pursuit of a world we all actively care for. To that end, we have developed a Manual of Maintenance to reimagine transit infrastructure in the essense of our manifesto. In the midst of transitioning out of a fossil fuel based industry, this manual aims to decommission existing single-use infrastructure, transitioning into sets of socio-ecological nodes and paths that form a larger connective tissue.The maintenance details, in various combinations and synthesis, are deployed in five selected areas of South Boston, which we are recasting as Gardens. The Gardens demonstrate various scales of intervention ranging from Home, Depot, Conservatory, Esplanade and Nursery. They present scenarios of deployment in increasing scales of agencies, involvement and care, and elaborate how they may evolve in time. The overall vision takes into consideration various factors, including the existing transit network, remnants of the fossil fuel based industry, ecological factors and opportunities in the existing land use. With the Gardens presenting this socio-ecological shift across scales, we hope to emphasize through our project the possibility of cultivating connections between humans and non-humans, seeing one another more clearly, and seeing more clearly the labor performed by all towards a world of care, compassion, and dignity. Keywords: Care, Hybrid Labor, Transit Infrastructure/Mobility
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Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
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The Plan B Tiangang Lyu, Zihui Zhang, Wenyu Xue Belinda Tato The City of Boston has already got emergency protocols for extreme cold weather, flood, and hurricanes. The Boston government emergency management website has listed out a bunch of tips for people and they can use community centers for temporary shelters for people during those emergencies. However, we need more. Under the context of what we are experiencing right now, the Coronavirus epidemic, we imagine in the near future, citizens would be more concerned about emergencies and a new emergency management plan is needed to improve the city’s resiliency, eliminate the panic of citizens and change our mindset. Facing the fact that we have limited vacant space, we plan to use the places that are not being fully used such as community centers, public parks, public schools, and our apartments. Combining with solar panel and water purification installation, our apartments could be both more sustainable during emergencies and environmentally friendly in peacetime. The park and school have the function of education. By incorporating emergencies into the daily landscape, we hope to convey the point that we are ready for future risks. Community centers have similar functions, they are both temporary shelter and playful spaces for citizens. In addition, other places like parking lot, warehouse and storage units, subway station, and seaport also have their emergency use. All these places form a new emergency management system to improve the city’s resiliency. Our project is the survival kit for South Boston and conveys the information for the citizens that the city is taken care of and is taking care of them.
Keywords: Emergency, Resiliency, Sustainable
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Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
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A City Worth Sauntering Matt Liebel, Annie Hayner, Sarah Doonan, Dominic Riolo Belinda Tato Today’s South Boston is a linear network of walls: it is an axial, unrelenting grid of parcelized and privatized space. In this condition, the public is shut out. While the dominance of the grid is a current problem, the future city of South Boston faces increasing development pressure that may serve to further jeopardize the quality of life in South Boston: increasing density, left unfettered, may lead to irreconcilable erosion of potentials for delight in the public landscape. However, in quoting Kevin Lynch, we believe that “the urban landscape, among its many roles, is also something to be seen, to be remembered, and to delight in”. As such, we propose just this for South Boston: a future city in which the right to beauty, the right to roam, and the right to see are established and protected in perpetuity. To achieve this, we propose the de-parcelization and conglomeration of the interior of city block spaces to be woven together, creating a network of public space. Through an overarching plan composed of these moment connections, out proposal is the embedding of a large park within the grid of South Boston itself. Replete with an array of programmatic spaces – ranging from the social and active to the quiet and introspective – we draw influence from Olmsted’s signature large park designs. However, instead of Olmsted’s stark division between city and park, we propose the embedding of the large park within the urban grid. Influenced by Charles Eliot’s foresight in the protection of land that became the greater metropolitan park system of Boston, we have created a code that would protect the spaces and moods of our large park, allowing a mediated form of the inevitable development that will occur around it. Lastly, we take our programmatic spaces into different cities around the world to ponder, in the spirit of the specific-generic, how this framework might transform the cities of our future from within. Keywords: Sight, Beauty, Delight
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Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
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Equal Ground Joanne Li, Sophia Xiao, Tian Wei Li, Ying Zhang Rosalea Monacella As a result of the fossil fuel era and the production of plastics during it, in the near-future, plastics are everywhere and are often undetected, taking on the form of microplastics. The city and the plastics that are embedded in urban metabolic flow impact resources, land, ocean, and living agents within and beyond its boundaries; they strip many non-human agents of the rights to water, shelter, food and territory that are meant to be shared, as well as ecological services that are meant to be reciprocated. Equal ground is composed of four rights: the right to shelter (diversity of spaces that support safety, nurturing, and rest), right to move (safe exchange in space), the right to forage (diversity and availability of sources of food), and the right to clean water (availability of fresh water sources). To achieve equal ground, the ecological strategy and the governance strategy are used collectively to create the urban assembly. In “Equal Ground,� we acknowledge that the microplastics on land in urban soil is largely a source of the marine microplastic problem and the global microplastic problem. We aim to decommission microplastics from urban landscapes by designing the phasing-out period, during which 3 different types of microplastics are filtered, immobilized, and extracted by ecological strategies. This process, in conjunction with an incentivized collective ownership and maintenance strategy, diversifies habitats and retransforms urban nature. The removal of microplastics from soil and the diversification and expansion of habitats reciprocates the right to shelter, water, foraging and movement by providing safer, richer and cleaner environment to all living agents. consequently, the built environment becomes a generator of ecological benefit to ensure a better environment on land and beyond. Deployed spatially, by reinvestigating the potentials of different types of blocks, Equal Grounds in the near-future city support a dominant right in each block (which generates the other three rights), with focuses on the residential blocks, vacant land, and minor streets. household wastes are inputs that get collected and gradually get transformed to outputs of the four rights. Therefore, to address the inter-relationship between blocks, Equal Grounds implements spatial design principles of openness, barriers and connections. Keywords: Microplastic, Equal Rights, Land Trust
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Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
Review Structure Instructors: Danielle Choi & Jill Desimini
Session One: April 29 1:30p to 5:00p Reviewers: Dan Adams, Neeraj Bhatia, Jungyoon Kim, Sergio Lopez -Pineiro 1. Caroline Craddock, Jaline McPherson, Ciara Stein 2. Yiyang Li, Tong Shen, Hao Wang 3. Alana Godner-Abravanel, Kara Gadecki, Polly Sinclair
Session Two: April 30 1:30p to 5:00p Reviewers: Jane Hutton, Sara Jensen Carr, Ed Wall 4. Ayami Akagawa, Ester Kim, Olivia So, Gracie Villa 5. Chelsea Kashan, Chloe Soltis, Brittany Giunchigliani 6. Nora Chuff, Kanchan Wali-Richardson, Max Smith-Holmes
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Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
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Street Heat Caroline Craddock, Ciara Stein, Jaline McPherson Jill Desimini All inhabitants of Dorchester have the right to be comfortable in the public sphere. Our near future city uses a hybrid approach to couple vulnerable social groups with strategies for increased cooling and neighborhood infrastructure. We combine strategic cooling methods such as tree canopy and water features with cooperative living structures to combat social isolation and excessive consumption while also encouraging participation in the public realm. Social injustice and heat are related. Lower income neighborhoods are areas of lesser investment from the city, resulting in less cooling features within the public realm. Likewise, as temperatures rise in summer months, households that are already strapped for resources must deal with extra cooling costs such as air conditioning, air-conditioned modes of transportation, and water usage. While air conditioning can provide relief from sometimes dangerously high temperatures, it also participates in a detrimental feedback loop, in which the more temperatures rise, the more we expend energy to power air conditioners, contributing to carbon emissions and the further heating of the globe. Lastly, if the only places that are comfortable to inhabit are those indoors, which usually form part of the private sphere, less people will be inhabiting the public sphere. If we continue like this, we will be faced with a deserted public sphere, in which humans blast AC units because of the high temperatures, only further contributing to the increase of these temperatures. Through cooperative living and cooling, we imagine a just block that can adapt to changing climate conditions. Current mechanisms of comfort rely largely on interior spaces with artificial cooling that saps energy in an already carbon heavy system, however with design we can reimagine what a comfortable public space means while also removing barriers that enforce isolation Keywords: Urban Heat Island Effect, Passive Cooling, Cooperative Living
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Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
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Cold Heart Reframing the Communal Refrigeration System Hao Wang, Tong Shen, Yiyang Li Danielle Choi Your refrigerator has a lot of stories to tell. It is a magic box that keeps food fresh and attractive before getting dumped. It is also the container of material and energy flow that you never consider. What lies behind the scene? We are interested in unpacking the social and environmental impacts based on the existing refrigeration system. What we envision and propose about the near-future city is to advocate the idea of “cold heart”, including collective responsibility, intelligently utilizing urban conditions and natural temperature, as well as redefining infrastructure significance for urban areas. The cold heart for new food storage system works as a nexus and a mediator between the individual and collective, the fixed and flexible, the domestic and infrastructural. This systematic food storage system indicates how to take advantages of the complex temperature distribution of deep seawater, soil thermal quality, vegetation passive cooling and rainwater, etc. Cold heart acts a new urban assemblage to create a microclimate area for food storage instead of a box like refrigerator and also brings a prospect to gradually break the boundary between exterior and interior, public and private. Both human and non-human living become engaged as consumers and agents and work actively with the redefined infrastructure to create this “cold heart” and the new public realm. Keywords: Refrigeration, Water System, Infrastructure
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Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
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Delay, Deconstruct, Distrubute Alana Godner-Abravanel, Kara Gadecki, Polly Sinclair Jill Desimini This project posits a near future city in which the existing urban systems of mixeduse residential development and historic preservation are recalibrated to prioritize community vitality and to create an evolving public realm. Currently operating as opposing forces, development rapidly changes a community while preservation holds it in static formation. Instead, this project encourages collaboration between these processes to allow for densification while simultaneously stimulating hyper-local investment. To do this, we propose a series of disturbances to the existing functions of “development” and “preservation.” In the rapid urban expansion of Boston, in general, and Dorchester specifically, new housing developments rely on the expediency and wastefulness of demolition. Once approval is gained, sites are quickly cleared of pre-existing urban fabric to make way for new construction. Demolition debris is trucked away without much thought given to its potential material value. As a way to temper this unchecked growth and waste, we propose wielding tools of historic preservation to ban wholesale demolition and instead require the disassembly of existing structures. With material reuse at the center of this reorganized process, delay, deconstruct, and distribute become tactics for building public realm that supports the existing community. Delay By requiring deconstruction, the process of development mandates a different construction timeline. This extended process—one that is cyclical and creates a micro material ecology of recycled elements—fosters opportunities for skilled labor training and local economic growth. Deconstruct Under the new system, all proposed developments are required to disassemble existing structures and transfer the materials to a determined local holding site for processing, sorting, and dispersal. Distribute From the holding site, the extracted materials are distributed into the public realm – as materials for new play and gathering spaces, for stormwater infiltration systems, and for streetscape maintenance and improvement.Over time, and through material reassembly, the holding site itself becomes a visible registration and spatial anchor for the community as it navigates future changes. Key words: Material lifespan, Community Development, Commons
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Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
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The Circular City Managing Material Habits to Transform Our Future Gracie Villa, Olivia So, Esther Kim, Ayami Akagawa Danielle Choi The Circular City supports new waste habits and promotes the value of soil; it is a city shaped by the urban forest. This proposal creates space for composting throughout the community and offers incentives to participate and produce soil for the city. In 2018, the City of Boston launched the Zero Waste Boston initiative to improve waste management and significantly reduce the percentage of materials sent to incinerators or landfills. Today, there is no municipal composting program in place, and up to 36% of the waste entering those disposal sites is squandered organic material that can be captured and reused. To reduce the waste and energy consumed by this system, this project seeks to divert both food scraps and yard waste into a local composting stream, creating a system that will return that matter to the communities that disposed of it. This cyclical approach will not only decrease the tonnage sent to MA landfills but enable residents to shape the urban landscape with their everyday actions by establishing a robust process to nourish urban soils, connect and expand a fragmented urban forest, and redefine the public realm, over time. An expanded urban forest requires the city to prioritize and support a healthy soil network; these new priorities will make demands on the existing urban fabric. This program will transform the city in 4 continuous phases, carving out space for a network that nourishes the landscape, manages resources, mitigates climate impacts, increases local labor and creatively addresses the housing crisis. Keywords: Compost, Urban Forest, Public Realm
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Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
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Restful Deposition Brittany Giunchigliani, Chelsea Kashan, Chloe Soltis Jill Desimini A city is the sum of all its parts - an accumulation of things. These things build up, accumulate, and decompose. We center the discussion on death, not to shed light on the passing of an individual’s life, but to address the accumulation of ones’ decisions that build the city - and inevitably it’s soil. The decision of how one rests leaves a mark on the earth; its covert material qualities and unique assemblage occupy what is underneath us, transform properties of urban soil as the mark of a person’s life above remains memorialized in a fixed form. Today, nearly all deceased receive some sort of burial or cremation. In the US, when you choose your place of rest, you are leasing that plot, and its soil, for infinity. By 2050, Dorchester will be out of space to bury their dead. This housing crisis below ground has inspired us to reimagine burial that can build land, rather than entomb it. We adopt a burial practice that transforms the human body into roughly one cubic meter of safe, rich soil that will be spread and piled at strategic points around the city. These mounds have their own individual capacity to hold moisture, vegetation, and memory, and represent a restfulness that accumulates differently. We foreground Dorchester’s historic layers of accumulation to introduce a new geologic layer - one that builds land with the city, with its people and its deceased, and with the tiny squiggly things that live in it. This project contributes to the deposition of memory, history, bacteria, and culture that merge with the layers of soil in the city. We situated our two main project sites among the existing network of cemeteries in Dorchester. At these sites, we explore the poetic and productive application of the soil that, unlike the cemetery, activate the surrounding streets, businesses, and communities through the design of a memorial plaza and market, and through the growth of specific crops. Although these play out two different spatial expressions on how to pile and spread this soil, we see restful deposition as a distributed network that can transform the city through a process of individual choice-making - one that builds back urban soils and results in the formation of collective memory. Key words: Soil, Accumulation, Death
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Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
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Elemental Electric Nora Chuff, Max Smith-Holmes, Kanchan Wali-Richardson Danielle Choi The current system of electrical production and distribution has prioritized immediate limitless access and made invisible its often highly destructive processes, encouraging the complacent increase of energy consumption. This project imagines a new land ethic for a near-future scenario in which cities consume less electricity by bundling elemental forms of power with the traditional linear infrastructures that shape urban streetscapes. Drawing upon the history of the Neponset River’s use as a source of energy for industrial production in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood, this project observes the collective identities associated with energy production. In the spirit of experimental historic preservation, Elemental Electric critically envisions a more culturally and ecologically integrated model for the relationships between water, power and landscape. We begin with the overlay of two distinct infrastructural networks – the regional electricity grid and the highly urbanized watershed. By knitting together hydropower with housing, the programmatic features of city life, and gradients of social need, this project takes form as a new neighborhood-scale public utility. Water collects, feeds and generates. Flowing through the city it gathers and is separated from associations with bodies, bacteria, roots, soil, tanks, canals, membranes, and turbines. As it drops, its pressure builds. Released from reservoirs it spins and then spreads. Water’s embodied movement splits onto its own path, one of wires, transformers, breakers and voltage readers. Through the spatial network, logistical framework, and communal sensibility all embodied by Elemental Electric, H2O becomes a new surging quantity of power. Released from the sky or an upland reservoir, water flows through a hybrid watershed, one made of both natural systems and sculpted edges. Water’s movement through the city becomes generative, not only of kilowatt hours but also of an enriched public realm. Public space acquires a new nature. Keywords: Water, Landscape, Power
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Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
Review Structure Instructors: Pablo Pérez-Ramos & Alex Wall
Session One: April 29 1:30p to 5:00p Reviewers: Jesse le Cavalier, Elizabeth Christoforetti, Gary Hildebrand 1. Diana Guo, Runke Luo, Yuning Zhang 2. Kongyun He, Echo Chen, Michele Chen 3. Chun Chen, Eun Soo Choi, Hyemin Gu Session Two: April 30 1:30p to 5:00p Reviewers: Rory Hyde, Marie Law Adams, Fadi Masoud 4. Ada Thomas, Laura Cui, Scarlet Rendleman 5. Guanyi Wang, Ji Wang, Jinying Zhang 6. Yifan Wang, Yuheng Wu, Lianliu Guo
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Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
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Snow Bank Diana Guo, Runke Luo, Yuning Zhang Pablo PÊrez-Ramos Snow Bank is a multi-scalar, community-based response to snow reuse for district cooling. We seek to redefine the commons through shared responsibility and redistribution of snow from one of urban waste to one of resource. Snow Bank extends the lifetime of snow from the winter to be up-cycled and used for cooling during the extreme heat of the summer. The design proposes to implement an acupunctural network of snow storage units inserted into the landscape that collect snow during cold seasons and emit cool air in the summer. While each move is small and acupunctural, the larger effect is visible and you start to see an overall cooling system emerge from the city fabric that addresses public and private cooling. As the climate changes, snowstorms grow more unpredictable in intensity, requiring people on the community level to come up with a rapid snow management plan that can clear the streets while preserving the snow as a valuable resource. At the same time, summer urban heat island effect is projected to increase, putting Eagle Hill’s residents at high risk for heat-related illnesses. This dual question asks us to rethink the unsustainability of current cooling infrastructures and asks us to look at eagle hill on a block by block basis as well as on a regional scale to find opportunities for rechoreographing heat and cold in the community. Rather than disposing snow into snow farms to melt and waste away, we propose that the neighborhoods can become spots to collect snow for a community-based shared district cooling system, through a variety of sizes and public programs. The deployment of coolers create dynamic above-ground surface programs such as skateparks, seating, playgrounds, and resting zones for public gathering. At the most localized scale, coolers are inserted in the backyards of residential parcels. These would be semi-private spaces for tenant use. At the medium scale, we have identified all the nooks and crannies of leftover pockets of space in the public sphere that are currently underutilized that could be re-appropriated for community use. Lastly, industrial sites and open lands are identified as a third level of defense for snow disposal. Together, these scales allow us to anticipate a range of snowfall depths and gives us a choreographed framework that extends the lifetime of snow from the winter into the hot months of summer. By cooling down these shared spaces, such as the parcels and shared spaces, we hope to make more visible the cultural and economic values of snow in communities and create cooler corridors. Key words: District Cooling, Snow Energy Reuse, Thermal Choreography
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Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
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Local Forest Coalition Creating a resilient supply chain from sustainable forest to urban social living Echo Chen, Michele Chen, Kongyun He Alex Wall Our project advocates for a future of reciprocal living between the forest and the city of East Boston. We aim to confront the current attitude towards preserving local forests while depleting natural resources from other countries. At the same time, we value the life cycle of the forest and the environmental benefits of renewable material by exploring new ways of using timber in constructing a flexible urban habitation. The proposal - Local Forest Coalition, ensures collaboration between forest owners, industries, and property owners for a common interest in managing the forest, constructing with timber, and reciprocating the labor done by the forest. At a local scale, our project decentralizes the wood supply chain by encouraging more people to own forestlands through tax incentives that promote sustainable forest management and responsible timber production. With similar tax-based incentives, small and modular living space that densifies the urban core will replace large-scale development sprawls. We envision a new, collective form of living inserted in the existing urban voids of East Boston. By building up and sharing the previously private properties on the ground level, we allow more space for stormwater management, habitat restoration, and recreation to encourage an inclusive and mutualistic relationship between human and non-human agents. An expanded green space, a network of multifunctional wood transition centers and wood assembly shops, and well-integrated community neighborhoods will create a vital future for East Boston. By imagining the city not just as a landscape of consumption, but also as a place that is deeply interdependent on the landscape of production, we can design for a future of urban living while designing with the forest. Keywords: Localize, Collaborate, reciprocate
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Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
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Energy Sovereignty Open Source Energy as Urban Experience Chun Chen, Eun Soo Choi, Hyemin Gu Pablo PĂŠrez-Ramos This project aims at reducing the distance between energy production and consumption, and suggest that such an operation can be used to provide new public spaces of quality for the underserved industrial landscape of East Boston. East Boston has been historically shaped by the large scales of energy production, transmission, and consumption. While the local residents live with the visual connection to the natural gas power plant in a nearby neighborhood and the large oil tank fields a few streets away, the increasing demand for energy constitutes a new zone of inaccessibility by designating East Boston to host a new large electric transformation station. While the Green New Deal advocates for renewable energy production, production is not enough. The shift to renewable generation will not mitigate the vulnerability of the transmission networks nor the impact that many components of the electric grid will continue to have on the urban landscape. With this project, we propose an integration of the production of renewable energy in the urban fabric. Energy will, therefore, be produced in areas of consumption, and the landscapes of energy will become part of the daily urban experience for local residents. We suggest the introduction of renewable energy and an intermediate-scale network into the urban fabric of the near-future city. Solar, tidal, and wind are visible, tangible forms of energy and the technology that harvests these powers have multiple scales in between the spectrum of a single solar panel to a tidal barrage. Finding the right scales of energy production in between the extremes in the right locations allows opportunities to hybridize energy production with the urban landscape. The low-income communities of East Boston cannot deal with carbon emissions reduction just by themselves. An intermediate scale of energy production that consists of multi-scale generation will mobilize the immense capacity of the energy sector that strategizes the production and consumption process across the boundaries of states as well as nations. Through this intermediate scale of energy production, Energy Sovereignty involves the investment from the federal, state, industrial, and local, bringing the consumer closer to the production process, while keeping the moral responsibility of carbon-cleanness as a collective goal of society. Keywords: Energy, Public Space, Integration
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Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
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Living Soil Ada Thomas, Laura Cui, Scarlet Rendleman Alex Wall Soils constitute the foundation for life. We depend on soil for every aspect of our basic needs, directly and indirectly: filtrating water and air, sequestering carbon, growing food, nurturing ecosystems, and providing shelter and structure for our livelihoods. Without healthy soil, nothing else can sustain. This project asks, what would happen if we put soils first? What kind of city would follow? Rather than a city that degrades and depletes soil, we imagine a city that nourishes and builds with soil. Situated on a drumlin in East Boston, Orient Heights is at less risk of sea level rise than the surrounding communities. However, it faces other challenges in the context of a changing climate. Increased atmospheric carbon and pollution, storm events of greater frequency and intensity, decreased biodiversity, and the inaccessibility of fresh, nutrientrich food are all part of the current urban reality in this part of Boston. Prioritizing soil in the urban context can begin to address some of these mounting concerns. Through the establishment of a continuous soil corridor through the entirety of Orient Heights, soil-building processes become visible and entangled with the livelihoods, cultural practices, and social experience of the neighborhood’s inhabitants. The spatial configuration of the corridor is defined by two strategies: 1) new land use typologies that prioritize building healthy soils; and, 2) built form that utilizes soil from within the community. These strategies serve to reconnect the community to the value of soil, through both collective responsibility and engagement, as well as establish a framework for the economic, cultural, and spiritual functions that soil can play in the urban context. We imagine a near future city where care for the land becomes a common language in daily activities and public infrastructure. Emerging from these new values is a culture of reciprocity with one another and with the living systems that sustain us. Keywords: Soil, Reciprocity, Biodiversity
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Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
PAGE: 47
Resilient Efficiency Toward an Automated and Water-Wise Transitopia Guanyi Wang, Ji Wang, Jinying Zhang Pablo Pérez-Ramos Resilient Efficiency uses the looming arrival of automated vehicles to challenge the mobility portfolio of East Boston and to provide an opportunity to rethink water management in the face of climate change and sea level rise. Discussions about AV systems and water-wise city development rarely intersect.The linearity of traffic flows and water flows allow to think them simultaneously and to reinforce their coexistence over the gradual transition into the future. East Boston accommodates a relatively low-income community. Accessibility to quality employment opportunities and infrastructures is limited and highly reliant on the Blue MBTA line. With rising sea levels and storm strikes, we start to question, how can a more automated, communal and condensed transportation system free up street space for smarter water management and better social dynamics? We thus propose an enhanced public transportation system and accompanying street renovations that shape the new form of mobility into a more collective and stormresilient future. The project is established on the recognition that the future success of AV technologies is not certain, but that they still offer, in any event, potential to trigger a sequence of transformations of the urban street landscape that might be directed towards the more critical water management agenda that underlies the current climate challenge. East Boston’s street fabric enables the implementation of a simple and concise AV network in the form of “loops”. Through cataloguing and efficiency evaluation about the existing street network, we come up with a calendar of incremental implementation, that begins with a low cost, knowledge-generating AV pilot program, and culminates with the formalization of a new water and transportation hybrid system. Key words: Automated Vehicle, Water Management, Public Transportation, Street System
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Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Core IV Final Review
PAGE: 49
Energy Multiplicity Yifan Wang, Yuheng Wu, Lianliu Guo Alex Wall Climate change is closely related to energy production and distribution. However, under the near-future scheme of such risks impacting our cities, the current centralized energy network won’t be resilient to potential challenges. A further dilemma is that the infrastructures we adapted to prevent such disasters are segregated frameworks, lacking the cohesion of building the urban resiliency. The consequence of this vulnerability is that without solving the centralized urban system, everything will become obsolete. The future city will face the contradictory need to accommodate new development while suffering the loss of vulnerable land to flooding and sea level rise. Our proposition takes the form of a hybrid energy network connecting production and consumption, mitigating potential ecological risks, and formulating urban landscape with new possibilities. The new energy infrastructure offers the East Boston area multiple approaches and reshapes the cityscape by considering energy metabolism and everyday living. Accordingly, to achieve higher efficiency, the proposed framework would be applied through different kinds of sustainable energy. From the temporal perspective, various agencies and developments are embedded in developing multiple layers of new infrastructure, which not only addresses the energy crisis through engineering methods, but also enriches urban vitality through diverse landscape forms. The consequence will be a complex transformation of materials, the relocation of residents, and the remediation of disturbed land, in which the proposed infrastructural system would be functioning through energy multiplicity. Keywords: Renewable Energy, Diversity, Flexibility, Infrastructure