2020 Studio Compendium

:

THE NEAR-FUTURE CITY Urban Assemblage Encoded for Change

Landscape Architecture Core IV STU 1212 Spring 2020 Harvard GSD

The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Landscape Architecture IV

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“... The result of over determination in 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 space...

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 Sennet, The Open City (2004) *Richard Sennet is an urban theorist whose writings focus on labor practices and the social life in cities.

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The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

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Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Landscape Architecture IV

Table Of Contents Teaching Team

004

Sections & Project Teams

006

Course Description

023

Preterm

032

Phase 01

050

Phase 02

064

Phase 03

080

Final Exhibition

236

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The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Landscape Architecture IV

Teaching Team & Project Teams

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The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Landscape Architecture IV

Teaching Team

Coordinators Jill Desimini Rosalea Monacella

Instructors Danielle Choi Pablo Perez-Ramos Belinda Tato Alex Wall

Worksop Instructors Mark Heller Amy Whitesides

Teaching Assistants Lamia Almuhanna Colin Chadderton Kira Clingen Sophie Elias Simon Escabi Dana Hills Edyth Jostol Jonathon Koewler Jonathan Kuhr Andy Lee Koby Moreno UJ Song Zhaodi Wang Alyson Wright

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The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

Jill Desimini

Jill Desimini is a landscape architect and associate professor at the GSD. She is trained as an architect and landscape architect and has practiced in both fields. Her current research, published in The Journal of Urban History, Landscape Journal and JoLA, investigates design strategies for abandoned landscapes. She is author of From Fallow: 100 Ideas for Abandoned Urban Landscapes, co-author of Cartographic Grounds: Projecting the Landscape as well as book chapters on fallowness, urban wilds and other related topics. Prior to joining the GSD, she worked at Stoss Landscape Urbanism, Atkin Olshin Schade Architects, Wallace, Roberts and Todd and KieranTimberlake.

Approach to Designing the City Cities are physical manifestations of complex systems: ecological, social, political, economic and cultural. Often interests that favor efficiency, profitability and growth suppress the underlying issues of the social and environmental terrain. Political boundaries dominate over hydrological ones; dominant voices drown out plural perspectives; and bottom lines become overstated criteria. As a result, the evolution of the urban environment is falsely seen as linear and short-term decisions imped long-term visions. A different take understands the urban as a cyclical condition, a specific and nuanced one that requires a close reading and a heterogeneous response capable of adapting to unpredictability across multiple spatial and temporal scales.

Cities Lived in: Portland, OR; Providence, RI; Paris, France; Brooklyn, NY; Philadelphia, PA; Boston, MA. Rresearched, drawn and written about: Philadelphia, PA; Boston, MA; Berlin, Germany; Amsterdam, Netherlands; Lisbon, Portugal; Saint Louis, MO; Detroit, MI and to some extent, the other 40+ US legacy cities.

Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Landscape Architecture IV

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Section Description

The Near-Future City, for us, operates at multiple scales where the assemblage becomes a form of network designed to tackle the distribution of urban services in a more equitable and absorptive manner. These networks address the jurisdictional, physical and socioeconomic characteristics of North Quincy broadly—its coastline, its water management, its ecological habitats, its established immigrant communities, its aging mobility infrastructure, its heavily-paved central corridor, its giant parking lots, its publicly-owned landscapes, its underperforming maintenance structures, its indices of wellness, its relationship to digital information, and the daily rhythms of its inhabitants.

These structural networks are explored across the region, but fully articulated through infill design strategies at the scale of the block, lot and parcel. Through these particular strategies, we investigate a wide-range of urban potentials: locally-managed stormwater districts, conservation easements, data easements, residential retrofits, de-investments in pavement, less dependence on the personal automobile, and the coupling of mobility infrastructure with markets, co-working spaces and community centers.

We believe in a type of succession planning that increases the legibility of the environmental factors, collapses singular uses, broadens existing networks, distributes services, and incorporates personal choice. The design of the Near-Future City depends on negotiation, recognizes failure, allows for different levels of buy-in and pushes more multiuse scenarios. Existing governmental agencies, as well as new departments, consortia, development partnerships and homeowner agreements tackle these negotiations. Through the process of speculation, we parallel the structuring of space with the structuring of collaborations, policies and incentives.

So whether you choose: to take a bike share to the large Asian market and community center before hoping on the light rail to visit a friend; or to live in one of the Beach Houses in the Woods where you can walk to an inward facing beach; or install a Swim on the Brim pool in your backyard and a mussel farm beneath your living room; or visit a hearth on your way home to work in your home office while gazing out on your newlyinstalled and thriving science garden, we all understand that the Near-Future City holds great opportunities for novel modes of living in North Quincy.

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The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

Rosalea Monacella

Rosalea Monacella is a registered Landscape Architect. She is a Design Critic in the Landscape Architecture Department at Harvard University. Her research explores design at the nexus of the urban and natural environments evidenced through projects completed around the world, including cities in China, USA, South America, Europe and Australia. She has been the recipient of a number of national and international awards and grants related to her practice-based research as co-founder of the OUTR Research Lab at RMIT University Melbourne, Australia. For ten years she acted as chief editor leading the development of Kerb Journal. She served as the Director of Landscape Architecture Program in the School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University, a role in which she managed and developed the constituent Programs of the Discipline and developed and implemented the 5-year program of Bachelor of Landscape Architecture Design and Master of Landscape Architecture Program. She has a book on Transitioning Cities: Low Carbon Futures being released by Actar later this year.

Approach to Designing the City Rosalea’s expertise is in the transitioning of cities through careful indexing and shifting of dynamic resource flows that inform the landscape of contemporary cities. Her research brings together complex urban issues and innovative digital modelling techniques for the generation of sustainable urban futures. Her design approach is one that simultaneously considers forces from the ‘ground-up’ and the ‘top-down’ through a careful and rigorous exploration of complex economic, ecological, and social systems that shape an everchanging city.

Cities Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra,London, Tijuana, Mexico City, Rio, Puerto Vallarta, Boston, Ho Chi Minh, Hanoi, Shanghai, Singapore, Siem Reap, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Rome, Changzhou, Wuxi, Suzhou, Chongqing, Beijing, Tianjin, Xian, Taipei, Miami, Los Angeles, Paris, Copenhagen, Milan, + plus a number of regional cities associated to countries listed above

Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Landscape Architecture IV

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Section Description

The Near Future is now, very soon and not yesterday, nor somewhere in the inconceivable future. We are currently living the tipping point of no return, consequently requiring uncompromised solutions for the Near-Future city. This describes the urgent need to address the social, economic and environmental inequities and instabilities of our cities that we currently face at specific local and global scales.

South Boston is an atypical case study area for the studio section as it exemplifies many of the issues faced by cities such as; gentrification, relocation of industries that were once considered a primary source of employment for the area, post-industrial land contamination, impacts of sea level rise, affordability and general social inequity.

As a studio section, the projects proposed by the students addressed one of the following key issues that are both specific for South Boston, and issues faced by many cities across the United States.These include; the dominance of large tech companies on information sourcing and storage; their logistical networks ability to satisfy our every need through the daily consumption of the cardboard box delivered to our doorstep; the disinvestment of ‘other nations’ in global agreements for plastic waste management dealing with the remnants of society’s consumptive desire; the ‘land-banking’ issues driving the affordability of living in the city and the resultant constant displacement of individuals and communities by the faceless network of multinational corporations or political institutions and their internal cycles of singular values and stagnant paradigms; and the commodification and objectification of ecosystem services in the carbon offset economy are some of the issues explored in the studio section.

The understanding of the urban assemblage of the city was transformed through this study to become an understanding of an interplay of protocols of heterogeneous parts and networks intertwined with the less tangible and indeterminate natures of metabolic and material processes representing complex systems that we understand as the city from the solely dictated conditions of market economies. The assemblage is multi-scalar, one that is subject to variable forces, and has the ability to influence across diverse ranges from the local to the global. It embraces multiple tensions and ways of living where coexistence is adopted as a mode of habitation and constant negotiation. The paradigms of the urban are subverted revealing the hidden and unforeseen, consequently forming an urban milieu of alternative social and environmental contracts.

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The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

Belinda Tato

Belinda Tato is co-founder of the firm Ecosistema Urbano established in 2000 in Madrid.

Ecosistema Urbano is an architecture, landscape and urban design office operating at the intersection between architecture, landscape design, engineering and sociology. Their approach can be defined as urban social design by which they understand the design of environments and spaces in order to enhance the community interaction and their relationship with the environment, with a special focus on bioclimatic conditioning as a design tool for public space reactivation. Tato works as consultant for the InterAmerican Development Bank and the World Bank, having developed projects that range from strategic landscape concept to detailed design for public spaces. Tato has led workshops, lectured and taught at the most prestigious institutions worldwide. Since 2010 she has been faculty at the GSD.

Approach to Designing the City Bioclimatic design aims to improve human thermal comfort by natural conditioning, conserving resources, and maximising comfort through design adaptations to site specific and regional climatic conditions (Hyde, 2008). Sustainability is essential, understood as the efficient management of resources: land, water, air quality, energy, wastes, etc. at every scale. Can we focus on bioclimatic design to aim for more sustainable urban models? Can we design with this criterion possible scenarios at a multi-scale approach to the street, the city and the territory? Can we consider time as a design tool

Cities Madrid, Spain.

Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Landscape Architecture IV

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Section Description

In today’s connected world and complex reality, design should result from an open and collaborative network of creative professionals, technical experts and citizens among other stakeholders. As designers, we rethink and reshape space over time but we also need to design protocols and initiate processes of which we do not control the end results. These open processes are able to dynamically respond to a morphing reality, resulting in an array of possible scenarios, making time an essential element in our design strategy and narrative.

The design of the process itself becomes a field of exploration and experimentation, and the successive transformations that occur throughout its deployment inform the process as a continuous feedback loop. The section has explored current socio environmental and economic dynamics occurring in South Boston. By unraveling the interwoven connections between these different layers, we can explore the possibilities of change that involve short term actions as catalysts for further and larger transformations, enabling us to envision more creative and sustainable future scenarios.

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The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

Alex Wall

Alex Wall is Design Critic in Landscape Architecture and Co-area head of MDes U-L-E at the GSD. He was Practice Professor in the School of Architecture at UVA, and between 1998-2014, Professor of International Urban Design at KIT, Germany. Recent research includes “Resilient Settlement and Productive Aquatic Landscapes: Framing Long Term Redevelopment Strategies for Virginia’s Coastal Communities.” He served as urban designer on a team led by Henri Bava winning the invited international Euregio 2008 competion.

His books include Victor Gruen: from urban shop to new city (ACTAR, Barcelona, 2005) and Cities of Childhood (Architectural Association, London, 1988).

Approach to Designing the City The city we want to build is a combined human-natural system in which urban development will co-evolve productively with local and regional ecosystem function. The urbanization process will not impede the health and productivity of the non-human world. What do the watershed and the local water cycle need? Thus urban place form together with the living systems of the city may be better able to adapt to hazards and trends of climate change.

Landscape has been put forward as a lens for understanding cities, yet ecology may be the lens for understanding the complex interactions of both landscape and city.

Cities London, Karlsruhe, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Houston, Chicago, Rotterdam, New York, Berlin, Stuttgart, Los Angeles, Venice, Rome, Jakarta, Hyderabad, Oslo.

Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Landscape Architecture IV

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Section Description

In the MLA Core IV, a landscape project is put forward as a lens for understanding urban structure and the interrelationships between the elements of an urban ensemble, or assemblage. In East Boston, this foray into urban design is accompanied by questions of the future of marsh habitat and ecosystems.

Four teams dealt with the future of the drumlin settlement of Orient Heights, Suffolk Downs, and the consequences of changing weather and rising seas. One of the implicit questions underpinning the projects was, can cities be cultivated like ecosystems, and evolve beyond settlement based on extraction to habitats which support a reciprocal exchange with the planetary environment. This means forms of urban development which co-evolve with changing local and regional ecosystem function not as two parallel systems but as a single reciprocally interactive system. If East Boston’s drumlin communities will be further isolated by flooding, then their quality of life will depend on a more cyclical metabolism reducing material inputs and reducing waste by recycling, transforming, reusing. These everyday tasks of stewardship promise a Near-Future City that is a messy and active workplace animated by new forms of husbandry.

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The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

Danielle Choi

Danielle Choi is an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Choi’s research concerns infrastructure, regionalism, and the synthetic role of landscape architecture in American urbanization, and considers how American political economy has been manifest in the landscape through projects of hydrological control and ecological stewardship. Archival work is used as a critical component of design research methodology as the cultural legacy of these projects is maintained through present-day projects of preservation, conservation, and restoration. Prior to joining the GSD, Choi practiced at Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, SCAPE, and Topotek.

Approach to Designing the City A metabolic approach to designing a resilient city would critically question frameworks of urbanism established under capitalist frameworks (e.g. growth vs. anti-growth; density vs. sprawl). Rather, it would consider multi-scalar definitions of scarcity and abundance for humans and non-humans relative to the (extant) material and (possible) political conditions of a territory. As specifically related to landscape architecture, this approach concerns: public realm and the retreat of the state, tropes of preservation and conservation, and multi-site interventions on inherited infrastructure.

Cities New York City, NY; Chicago, IL; Austin, TX; Boston, MA; Berlin, Germany.

Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Landscape Architecture IV

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Section Description

Life in the near-future city of Quincy requires a new social contract between individuals, communities, and the state. How will the consequences of climate change, already evident in the landscape, affect the rituals, routines, cycles, and conflicts of everyday life in an increasingly diverse community? Rather than retrofit this present into a “sustainable” future, how might the design of a near-future city demand new forms of physical infrastructure that shape and reflect social relationships among neighbors? For many years, Quincy has been at the “end of the pipe” (for sewage infrastructure) and near the “end of the line” (for mass transit). These four proposals explore how design can re-form and invent infrastructure to seek environmental equity upstream and downstream, from surface through the water table, and for populations persistent, mobile, and in retreat.

New urban districts choreograph the exchange of snow between the MBTA and Quincy residents, transforming an energy-intensive battle for mobility into a seasonal resource and establishing pathways for other forms of material movement. The inherited foundations of the 20th century city are repurposed in-situ to create near-term sources of construction materials and foster a “living ground” for residents both alive and dead.

Regional freshwater systems are reconfigured at the scale of domestic life; collective water use and a plurality of reuse supports multi-generational housing and mitigates strain on the municipal sewer system. The cultural identity of the suburban yard is replaced, over time, by localized watershed management, preserving a sense of community throughout a transitional period of retreat and densification.

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The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

Pablo Pérez-Ramos

Pablo Pérez-Ramos is Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He holds Doctor of Design and Master in Landscape Architecture degrees from the GSD, and is a licensed architect from ETSAMadrid. His research focuses on the formal associations between landscape architecture and ecological theory, and on the legibility of the interferences between design and the other forces and agencies through which the environment is formed. He has been the Urban Landscape Program coordinator in the Northeastern University School of Architecture. He has been in the editorial board of New Geographies between 2013 and 2018, and has co-edited New Geographies 08: Island.

Approach to Designing the City Urban landscapes as synthetic spaces that support the economic, social, and ecological life of cities, as medium that supports capitalism but that also has the capacity to regulate it Environment understood as a space-time continuum saturated with energy, and landscape architecture as a material practice that introduces new orders on the environment, seeking to transform the ways in which energy flows across the environment Emphasis on the legibility of different modes of interaction between deliberately designed landscapes and their environments, and of the different ways by which designed landscapes speed up or slow down the processes that make the city

Cities Barcelona, Spain; Madrid, Spain; Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, Spain; Bordeaux, France; Quito, Ecuador; Boston, MA; New York City, NY; Hangzhou, China.

Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Landscape Architecture IV

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Section Description

Students in this section have been working in East Boston, a 40,000 residents neighborhood to the north of Boston that was formed through the connection of several islands.

Separated from downtown Boston by the harbor, East Boston serves to connect the main city with the coastal communities of the north of the Massachusetts Bay. Transportation has played an important role in the shaping of the area: East Boston is not only a ground infrastructural corridor, but is also flanked by Logan International Airport, and the Chelsea Creek, a waterway used by ships approaching two large oil tanks fields that dominate the neighborhood and that feed the nearby airport.

Site analysis and field work revealed that, as a result of these formative forces, the most pressing issues in the East Boston area are the high levels of air and ground contamination, the general obsolescence of many of its industrial spaces, the high degree of disconnection that exists between apparently adjacent neighborhoods, and the vulnerability of the area to sea level rise. Students in this section have been confronting these specific East Boston issues in tandem with the more general affordable housing crisis in the Boston area, as well as with some mobility and metabolic challenges proper of the near future city agenda.

This section, therefore, has emphasized: 1, an understanding of urban landscapes as synthetic spaces that support the economic, social, and ecological life of cities; 2, an understanding of landscape as physical medium upon which capitalism operates, but also, and inseparably, as physical medium that has the capacity to regulate capitalism; 3, and, lastly, and more broadly, an understanding of landscape architecture as the production of material orders that regulate energy flows in the environment, but also, and inseparably, as the reorganization of energy flows towards the stabilization and maintenance of certain material orders.

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The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

Sections & Project Teams Danielle Choi Yiyang Li Tong Shen Hao Wang Ayami Akagawa Esther Kim Olivia So Gracie Villa Nora Chuff Max Smith-Holmes Kanchan Wali-Richardson

Jill Desimini Caroline Craddock Jaline McPherson Ciara Stein Kara Gadecki Alana Godner-Abravanel Polly Sinclair Brittany Giunchigliani Chelsea Kashan Chloe Soltis

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Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Landscape Architecture IV

Rosalea Monacella

Belinda Tato

Fabiana Casale Yvonne Fang Maria Ulloa

Xin Feng Angela Moreno-Long Jiani Zhang

Eric Van Dreason Natalie Khoo Lauralee Williams

Tiangang Lyu Wenyu Xue Zihui Zhang

Joanne Li Tian Wei Li Sophia Xiao Ying Zhang

Matt Liebel Annie Hayner Sarah Doonan Dominic Riolo

Pablo Pérez-Ramos

Alex Wall

Diana Guo Runke Luo Yuning Zhang

Echo Chen Michele Chen Kongyun He

Chun Chen Eun Soo Choi Hyemin Gu

Lianliu Guo Yifan Wang Yucheng Wu

Guanyi Wang Ji Wang Jinying Zhang

Laura Cui Scarlet Rendleman Ada Thomas

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The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Landscape Architecture IV

Course Description

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The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Landscape Architecture IV

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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 to be 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.

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The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

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.

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 lenses through which we can tackle the key elements and systems of the “Near-Future City ”.

Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Landscape Architecture IV

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The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

Post Carbon Near Future City

‘Cities are major contributors to climate change. According to UN Habitat, cities consume 78 per cent of the world’s energy and produce more than 60 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, they account for less than 2 per cent of the Earth’s surface. The sheer density of people relying on fossil fuels makes urban populations highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Fewer green spaces exacerbate the problem. According to the IPCC report, limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius would “require rapid and far-reaching transitions in uses of energy, land, urban and infrastructure (including transport and buildings), and industrial systems.”

An added challenge is the projection, in a UN report, that another 2.5 billion people will reside in urban areas by 2050; nearly 90 per cent of them in cities in Asia and Africa. The good news is that cities around the world have already begun to take measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and are putting policies in place that encourage the use of alternative energy sources. Efforts by policy makers and administrators to address climate change, however, will need to accelerate to keep pace with population growth and the rapid climate change. The effects of climate change are worse among poor and low-income communities, in part because many live on the margins of society, in unstable structures, and in areas more susceptible to flooding, landslides, earthquakes, but also because of inadequate capacities, inadequate resources and reduced access to emergency response systems’

Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Landscape Architecture IV

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The studio proposes that radical proposals are necessary for the Near Future City to transition to a post-carbon urban condition. This future involves innovation in how we live, consume and move in our urban environments with the understanding that the future may require continual adaptation. This doesn’t require a retreat to medieval paradigms or an over-reliance on technologies (including new technologies that don’t exist yet) to provide the solutions. The future requires a re-tooling of the metabolic processes and material flows associated with the city. Herein, we aspire to shape urban assemblages, driven by landscape and ecological principles, that consider social, economic and environmental impacts at the regional, national and planetary scales.

How and who deploys interventions and transitions the city to a post-carbon future needs to carefully considered as an integral part of the urban assemblage’s DNA.

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The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Landscape Architecture IV

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Course 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.”.

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The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Landscape Architecture IV

Modules & Student Work

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Preterm Workshop Urban Assemblages

The pre-term workshop is an introduction to the overarching conceptual agenda and the associated tools and techniques of the studio. In the workshop, we will begin our investigation of urban elements and metabolic systems, in order to ultimately develop a profound understanding of the building blocks of the city and their governing systems, inputs and outputs. We will focus on the development of an integrated ecological and urban assemblage, or piece of city fabric that contains all of the essential ingredients necessary for reading and making the urban. These ingredients are inherently relational, locally, regionally, nationally and globally. In the assemblage, the distinctions between infrastructure, ecology, landscape and building are blurred in favor of an integrated approach where all elements are intertwined. The urban can be understood as a thick section from deep ground to deep sky. After our initial inquiries into the assemblage, We will begin grounding it within the greater Boston region, a place vulnerable to the uncertainties related to the effects of climate change. We are proposing the radical steps necessary to transition to a post-carbon urban condition. This formation of the urban involves the re-tooling of the metabolic systems and material processes associated with the city.

The pre-term workshop is broken down into two parts. The first part will introduce students to the principles of the urban landscape through a suite of lectures and modeling workshops that explore the urban condition and its potential resiliency.

The second part of the workshop will focus on methods of critically constructing and varying an urban assemblage. Here, it is important to remember that the urban assemblage is compact, and that it has the ability to inscribe meaning and power, and encode value. Throughout the workshop, we will look at case studies derived from a range of historical ideas of the city.

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The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

Point / Direction / Distance

Point / Distance X

X X X

X X

X

X

Point / Rotation / Distance

Point / Direction / Distance

Tema, Doxiadis Associates, 1960 Chen Chun

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Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Landscape Architecture IV

Plan for Tema Doxiadis Associates 1960

study of housing orientation and shadow

existing March 21st shade accumulation

existing June 21st shade accumulation

0°

existing December 21st shade accumulation

15°

60°

30°

65°

45°

shadow study through rotation of standard Tema house type

90°

Olivia So Matrix of Principles

1:1500

Plan for Tema Doxiadis Associates 1960

variations on pedestrian pathways to the community public space and primary school shadow study on June 21

access direction traffic size

10p

25p

50p public space

public space

public space

civic and commercial centre

public space

civic and commercial centre

public space

public space

public space civic and commercial centre public space

existing

public space

public space

civic and commercial centre

1:1500

Tema, Doxiadis Associates, 1960 Olivia So

civic and commercial centre

Olivia So Matrix of Principles

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The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

Residential Area/Open Space

Industrial Area/Open Space

Residential Zone 1

Industrial Zone 1

Modular : 5 x 5 Total Area: 125000m2 R Area: 5000m2 Open Area: 120000m2 Ratio: 4.1%

Modular : 5 x 5 Total Area: 125000m2 R Area: 10000m2 Open Area: 115000m2 Ratio: 8.6%

Bussiness Center

Recreation

Industrial Zone 2

Farmland

Residential Zone 2 Modular : 5 x 5 Total Area: 125000m2 R Area: 3000m2 Open Area: 122000m2 Ratio: 2.4%

Modular : 5 x 5 Total Area: 125000m2 R Area: 12000m2 Open Area: 113000m2 Ratio: 10.6%

Education

Industrial Zone 3

Residential Zone 3

Modular : 5 x 5 Total Area: 125000m2 R Area: 11000m2 Open Area: 114000m2 Ratio: 9.6%

Modular : 5 x 5 Total Area: 125000m2 R Area: 4000m2 Open Area: 121000m2 Ratio: 3.3%

Industrial Zone 4

Residential Zone 4

Modular : 5 x 5 Total Area: 125000m2 R Area: 9000m2 Open Area: 116000m2 Ratio: 7.8%

Market

Modular : 5 x 5 Total Area: 125000m2 R Area: 13000m2 Open Area: 112000m2 Ratio: 11.5%

Airport

Residential Zone 5

Industrial Zone 5

Ratio: 5.1%

Ratio: 2.1%

-reduce imprevious surface -encrease shades

-low rise buildings -create intervals

o

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35.5

-trees prevent direct wind -linear layout blocks wind

-reduce harsh wind on street -higher rise building

C

37

Ground Temperature

Tema, Doxiadis Associates, 1960 Chen Chun

-energy saving -community sharing

-remediate soil -increase greenary space

m/s 2.1

3.4

Wind Rose

6.2

µg/m3 0

2

4

Pollution Level

Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Landscape Architecture IV

Broadacre City, Frank Lloyd Wright, 1935 Xin Feng

PAGE: 39

PAGE: 40

The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

1

1

1

1

1

888 m

2

2

2

Vineyard & Orchard

2

444 m

3

A

A

3

257 m

3

A

230 m

7m

3m

65 m

65 m

N

562 m

3

2

2

2

147 m

A

A

2

2

465 m

276 m

3

ROAD POSITION

1 12 LANE HIGHWAY 1

1 1

2

135° 45° 5°

A

2

14 m

3 NEIGHBORHOOD ROAD

135°

2 3 A

3

2

45°

45°

A

3

2

2 MAIN ROAD

1

3

44 m

A

Broadacre City |Brittany Giunchigliani

2

14 m

2

VARIATIONS ON ROAD HEIRARCHY, ORIENTATION, AND POSITION

44 m

2

2

45°

45°

ROAD ORIENTATION 7m

A1

RESIDENTIAL ROAD

XY VARIATION

3m

MASSING STUDY (BROAD ACRE + SLOPE)

SLOPE VALUES 1:1 1:2 1:4 1:8 1:12 1:20 --1:20 1:12 1:8 1:4

Broadacre City |Brittany Giunchigliani

VARIATIONS ON SLOPE OF ROAD AND MASSING OF BROAD ACRE

ROAD SLOPE + -

Broadacre City, Frank Lloyd Wright, 1935 Brittany Giunchigliani

1:2 1:1

MASSING STUDY (SLOPE + ORIENTATION)

1:20

1:8

1:4

1:4

45°

45°

XZ VARIATION

Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Landscape Architecture IV

Broadacre City, Frank Lloyd Wright, 1935 Lianliu Guo

PAGE: 41

PAGE: 42

The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

Broadacre City, Frank Lloyd Wright, 1935 Zhihui Zhang

Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Landscape Architecture IV

Garden City, Ebenezer Howard, 1902 Runke Luo

PAGE: 43

PAGE: 44

The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

Garden City, Ebenezer Howard, 1902 Tong Shen

Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Landscape Architecture IV

Garden City, Ebenezer Howard, 1902 Guanyi Wang

PAGE: 45

PAGE: 46

The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

6:00 AM

8:00 AM

7:00 AM

9:00 AM

Chloe Soltis

Metabolic Photon Energy Flow Photon Movement Through Window

Photon Movement Through Courtyard

Overhang

June 21: Noon

Window

June 21: Noon

March & September 21: Noon

March & September 21: Noon

December 21: Noon

December 21: Noon

No Sun Infiltration

Partial Sun

Full Sun

SOUTH NORTH

SOUTH NORTH

Health (Vitamin D)

Heat (Warmth)

Photosynthesis

Intensity:

Chloe Soltis

Kingo Houses, JØrn Utzon, 1956 Chloe Soltis

PAGE: 47

Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Landscape Architecture IV

KINGO HOUSES

10 am

Matrix 1 : Solar Orientation in relation to house proximity & existing common areas in relation to entrances/exits

16m

12 pm

0

0

2 pm

15m

April

January

July

Chelsea Kashan

KINGO HOUSES

Shared wall - overlap

Matrix 2 : Variations for greater courtyard sun exposure in January mid-day & common space defined adjacent to one wall of private courtyards

16m

Corner touch

0

0 5m

5m

15m

Area with no shade in all variations Potential common area adjacent to one edge of private courtyard

Chelsea Kashan

Kingo Houses, JØrn Utzon, 1956 Chelsea Kashan

5 meter distance

5m

Area with shade in all variations

South wall

South wall

South wall

PAGE: 48

The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Landscape Architecture IV

PAGE: 49

PAGE: 50

The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Landscape Architecture IV

PAGE: 51

Phase 01 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 three studio themes and across the three 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.

Phase One has takes site as a point of departure and explores the city through its model and its intertwined network of information. The students confront a fundamental question: how is inhabitation—with its associated dimensions—designed to contend with changing political, social, economic and climatic conditions? Through an indexing of site conditions in relation to a studio thematic, the students develop a set of key relationships that will form the basis of their design work. From here, the students define the key constituencies and rudiments of their project. In addition, they take a critical position on the studio brief.

PAGE: 52

Akagawa, Kim, So, Villa

The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

PAGE: 53

Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Landscape Architecture IV

VRB vs. LIB

Substatial Storage Market

Dominated by V-Flow and Li-Ion $50-100 Billion by 2025

Mystic Station

­

­

Relative DC Cost in Percent

Long Duration Advantage

­

­

40 20 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Cycles, Time

Northeast Electric Vehicle Network

­

­

­

­ ­

$300~150 / kWh

16,000 MT

13,000 MT

8,400 MT

$1,750 / kWh

43,000 MT

POWER GRID COMPONENTS Supply Chain

ctr

le

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04 ity

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04

04

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Chen, Gu, Choi

Wattjoule Vanadium Electristor

7

60

00 345

Solid Batteries ( lithium, lead-acid, others)

Cost Benefit

80

Storage Duration in Hours

­

s

Lithium-ion

100

lt Vo

120

­

00 650

Advanced Vanadium Flow Batteries 20+ years

140

Capacity

­

Anolyte e Pump

Discharging

-

Electrolyte Tank

+

e Pump

Peak

Catholyte

EXELON

Electrode ­

Decline

Ion-selective membrance

­

Formatting

PAGE: 54

The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

Neighborhood share of Boston House of Correction commitments and jail detentions relative to neighborhood share of Boston residents, 2013 0

1

2

3

SOCIAL & CLIMATE INJUSTICE risk less 0

4

Fra Franklin rank ankliin nF Fi Fie Field iieelld ield d

more 3.25

7.5 km

N

Social factors: percent renter occupied, percent minority population, and household income Climatic factors: temperature, and temperature Releases from Suffolk County House of Correction, 2009-2015

Egleston Egl Eg glestto on Square S Sq quare Dudley Dudlleey Square Squ Squarree Gro ove ve Hall Hallll Grove Wel We W Well eelllingt llling liin in ingt ng gton Hill H Hil iill Wellington Codman Cod m ma an a n Square Sq Squa are re re

Suffolk House of Corrections

Rox Roxbury oxb xb bury ury

DORCHESTER HEAT BLOCKS

South South End End

social inequity

Downtown Downto to to ow wn less

Matt Ma atttapan ttapa an Mattapan

0

more 1.5

3 km

Fiieeeld lds Corner ld Cor orner er Fields Dorchester Do orrch heees est sstteerr Uphams Up U ph ham ams Corner Cor Co orn rn rne neer Chinatown Chin na ato own wn n Jackson Ja ackso cksso ck son on Square Sq qu uare Lower Lo Lo ow weer Mills w Miills lls South South So h Boston Bo osto s t on Maverick Mavveerriicck ck Square Squa are re re Savin Sav S avin Hill Hilll

Commitments to the Suffolk County House of Correction and the Nashua Street Jail, 2013

Hyde Hyyde Park Hyd H Pa P arrk k Lower Lo Lowe L ow wer eerr Washington Wash hiin ngtto on East East Boston ossst o osto ston ton on Mission Miission ssion n Hill Hilll Charlestown Cha Ch harllestow esto es o own wn wn Roslindale Rosl sllinda indallee No Action Jamaica Plain 60

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Brighton Brriight gh g hton h to on n Backbay Bacckb kbay ay

40

Slow Action

Allston Alllsstto Al on Rapid Action

30

Fenway Feen nway ay Longwood Lo Lon on ong ng n gwood Medical Mediiccca al al

20

10

0

2019

Mid-century

Late-century

Days Above 32.2 °C in Suffolk County, MA

0

IG NE IALS NT SE ES OLD EH US /mo HO ING $550 TH IES CLO R E OC GR INE DIC ME

PO CO WER NN EC TIO

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CT

1 km

PAGE: 55

Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Landscape Architecture IV

AIRSPACE DYNAMISM

180°0'0" 170°0'0"W

170°0'0"E

160°0'0"W

160°0'0"E

r

/y

rs

ge

en

ss

pa

n

150°0'0"W

io

ll

150°0'0"E

.1

t

-

mi

87

or

rp

l

Ai

na

io

140°0'0"W

at

rn

140°0'0"E

te

da

In

ne

o

Ha

ky

To

San

r

s/y

ger

Fra

sen

nci

sco

lio

ern

ati

ona

l

130°0'0"W

Air

por

t

Los

Ang

-

mil

sen

ai

Pud

ngh

s/y

ona

Int

ong

pas

ger

t LAX

- 84.

120°0'0"W

5 mil

sen

g Int

g Kon

s/y

r

Hon

a: 22.

4%

l Int

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100 t -

jin

of wor ld

Bei

9%)

ines

air

nam

traffi

c 4.7 %

r Inter

natio

nal

rt 61.3

Viet

110°0'0"W

growth

since

80°0'0"S

2018

Airpo

70°0'0"S

on passe

ngers

Asia

/yr

d of worl

% - 34.8

fic and Paci

milli

#1 fast

fic air traf

%)

air

cted

since

rs (5.3

enge

pass

%)

for

econ

ing

growth

9.5%

st proje

esia

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for

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d grow

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#4 fast

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air

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tes

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ita

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r

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s/y

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sen

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mil

por

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ona

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l Air

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120°0'0"E

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n pas

n pas

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por

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ger

sen

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r

l Air

74

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mil

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130°0'0"E

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pas

n

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air

rs (6.2

enge

pass

2018 ngers

air passe my for

)

(5.2%

ng econo

growi

#5 faste

60°0'0"S

Mexico #8 fastest projected

Dallas/For

t Worth Internatio

growing economy for air passengers

nal Airport

100°0'0"W

DFW - 67 million

(4.7%)

passengers

/yr

4.3%) for air passengers growing economy fastest projected Malaysia #10

19,622 Airports in the U.S.A: 5092 public airports, 14530 private airports

O’Hare International Airport Chicago - 79.8 million passengers/yr

50°0'0"S

Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta International Airport - 103.9 million passengers/yr

90°0'0"W 50°0'0"S

logan airport 80°0'0"W

r

60°0'0"S

gers/y

New York y JFK

John

t 59.4

n passen

millio

Airpor

F. Kenned

096°

65°N

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70°0'0"S

71.0

42.3

(5.1%)

gers

air passen y for

Colomb

n LAX

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Airp

- 38.1

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tota

avg.

on Loga

n per

st proje

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50°0'0"E

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pa rs (5 %)

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Projection: Lambert Azimuthal Equal Area Datum: WGS 1984 False Easting: 0.0000 False Northing: 0.0000 Central Meridian: 0.0000 Latitude Of Origin: 90.0000

1 inch = 865.02 miles

Guo, Luo, Zhang

1,400

2,800

5,600

%)

ge

ARCTIC TUNDRA

Miles

GLOBAL SNOW COVER

(4

.9

en

SNOW OWL ANNUAL MIGRATION

Coordinate System: North Pole Lambert Azimuthal Equal Area

0

rs

r

FLIGHT ROUTES commercial

ge

ai

MIDSIZE AIRPORTS private + military

en

r

Over 65 million jobs are supported worldwide in aviation and related tourism.

Of this, 10.2 million people work directly in the aviation industry.

Pounds of freight carried by aircrafts per year

pa

ss

fo

2018

In 2019, 4.5 billion passengers were carried by the world's airlines.

ai

r

om

18

h since 7.2% growt

Worldwide, flights produced 915 million tonnes of CO2 in 2019.

Over 80% of aviation carbon dioxide emissions are emitted from flights of over 1500 km, for which there is currenty no practical alternative mode of transport.

LEGEND

MAJOR AIRPORTS commercial + military

fo

r

ec

20

g

in

e

ow

nc

gr

om

ic air traff

44.3 billion pounds

ec

on

2018

of world

915 million tonnes 4.5 billion 65 million 80% CO2 emissions

gr

ow

oj

ow

pr

passenge

oj

es

- 72.2 million

pr

st

9%

Airport

t

fa

3.

de Gaulle

es

#3

rs/yr

c

ion

st

ia

mill

fa

since

26.3%

Charles

ab

fi

Ar

af

#7

growth

Paris

es

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at

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iona

ab

r

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ed

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hrow

it

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traffi

Heat

Un

wo

10°0'0"E 0°0'0"

air

on

of

10°0'0"W

20°0'0"E

world % of - 2.1

Lond

2%

20°0'0"W

9.

30°0'0"W

-

rr

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le

La

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&

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gr

dd

1%

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7.

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fi

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60°0'0"W

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growi

my for air passe

ion mill ht oper h: 2.8 ion mont mill h: 54 mont me per volu

rs per

enge

pass

avg.

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#2 faste

h: 30,3

mont

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l flig

avg.

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30 flig

r

rs/y

pass

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mill

80°0'0"S

70°0'0"W

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ted growin

t projec

fastes ia #6

(6.1%

)

PAGE: 56

Guo, Luo, Zhang

The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

PAGE: 57

Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Landscape Architecture IV

Field Work Cedar Grove Cemetery Dorchester, MA 02.04.20

177 mi

AMAZON.COM

STONEMOR PARTNERS

MATTHEWS INTL

ROCKS OF AGES CORP

STEWART ENTERPRISES INC.

1-800-FLOWERS.COM

CARRIAGE SERVICE INC.

WALMART

$1 M

WHO CONTROLS DEATH 7,000+ mi

$15 B

$100 M

$300 M

$500 M $600 M $700 M

Pesticides C₈H₁₄ClN₅

$900+ M

2,516

EMPLOYEES

21,700

4,900

257

$800 M C₃H₈NO₅P

C₉H₁₁Cl₃NO₃PS 4,000

917

3,500

13,087

1960

2,200

C₁₅H₂₂ClNO₂

1950 Nor’easter

1970

1980

1990

2000

2010

2030

2020

NH₃

C₂₂H₁₄CuO₄

CrO₃ AS₃O5 CuO

Wood Preservative

Zn

Cr

Mg

As

Hg

Cd

Paint Chemicals

Ni

Pb

AS₂O3

CH2O

Formaldehyde

Giunchigliani, Kashan, Soltis

NET REVENUE

$200 M

$400 M

2,100,100

PRODUCTION

Steel coffin: 18 or 20-gauge steel delivered from steel producer in coils; small coil may weigh 1,000 lb while largest may way 20,000 lb; steel coil sent through leveler to straighten it; metal is cut into large blanks by blanking machine; they are fed through a die stamper, stamping parts into shell and then passed through welding area.; workers feed parts into auto welder making the body of the coffin; tops are also welded this way; worker welds by hand any areas the welding machine did not cover; then its passed through a painting area, painted through hoses, primer then paint; caskets are baked to set paint; special formulated paint; the casket is then accessorized, steel handles are welded by hand; lining bought in dimensions from supplier; can be made on-site by a seamstress; final product goes through inspection and is wrapped in large sheets of packing paper; corners given additinal packaging; then it is put in a clear plastic bay; it is then shrink-wrapped in plastic once again; before shipping, it is wrapped in a rug similar to mover’s blanket; driven by truck to warehouses for distribution

SERVICE CORP INTL

HILLENBRAND, INC.

1,565 mi

PAGE: 58

Casale, Fang, Ulloa

The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Landscape Architecture IV

Li, Wang, Shen

PAGE: 59

PAGE: 60

Li, Li, Xiao, Zhang

The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Landscape Architecture IV

Feng, Moreno-Long, Zhang

PAGE: 61

PAGE: 62

The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Landscape Architecture IV

PAGE: 63

PAGE: 64

The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Landscape Architecture IV

PAGE: 65

Phase 02 Urban Assemblage

In Phase Two, Urban Assemblage of the “Near Future City,” we will continue with the premise explored in Phase One and develop it into an urban assemblage for the “Near-Future City.” We will continue to identify the agents and processes of material ecologies. From here, we will create a project-specific catalog of urban elements and explore their inherent principles and protocols for assembly, adaptation and mutation. Through the combination of proposed urban element(s), we will develop a suite of urban assemblages that inherently articulate the “DNA” of the “NearFuture City” proposal. The urban assemblage will be considered as a “thick ground” with tangible and intangible characteristics for responding to states of uncertainty across 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 driven by principles drawn from an understanding of planning, urban design, engineering, ecology and market economies.

Phase Two continues to develop the agents, metabolic processes, and material flows established in Phase One. The task of this phase is to develop a catalog of urban elements for the “Near-Future City” and to combine these elements into an urban assemblage. This will be done by: detailing of the characteristics and conditions found in the work on metabolic process and material flow; by refining and translating these characteristics and conditions in order to arrive at a specific suite of urban elements; and by using these elements to identify the “DNA” of your project’s urban Assemblage for the “Near-Future City.” The aspiration is to synthesize the translation of metabolic flows and material processes into a proposed Urban Assemblage that describes an advanced “DNA” of the city and its inherent potential for assembly, adaptation, distribution and mutation.

PAGE: 66

The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

Urban living space schematic assemblage

Transition Center in East Boston

Wood transport, assemblage, regulation and re-distribution

urban living space schematic assemblage

Wood Regulation

4’-10’

10’-15’

Wood Assemblage

Wood Distribution

20’-30’

Urban public space

Near future: key connection to urban framework

Chen, Chen, He

Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Landscape Architecture IV

PAGE: 67

103 feet

95 feet

40 feet 93 feet

5’

10’

20’

1” : 10’

35 feet

12 feet

5’

1” : 10’

Chuff, Smith-Holmes,Wali-Richardson

10’

20’

PAGE: 68

The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

HOUSEHOLD FLOWS THROUGH A DORCHESTER STREET

G SIN S EA RE CR TU IN ERA MP

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diesel emissions

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Artificial Water Features

shade structures less public

more public

more public

public square with water pumps

swimming pool

splash pad

misters

paddling pool

drinking fountain

fire hydrant

sprinkler

18,500 sq m

450 sq m

25 sq m

10 - 200 sq m

1.25 sq m

0.23 sq m

0.1 sq m

0.00025 sq m

less public

shade fabric

pergola

canopy/tent

steel form

vertical shade wall

trellis

Indoor Cooling Nodes more people accomodated

more people accomodated

materiality

high thermal mass

shopping center

library

community center

place of worship

community hall

5,000 - 1,250,000 sq m

585 - 86,400 sq m

2,500 sq m

1,200 sq m

500 sq m

less thermal mass

brick

concrete

turf

mud

wood

asphalt

landforms

less public

underground

wetland

beach

Craddock, McPherson, Stein

hilltop

gravel

meadow

natural clay

steel

Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Landscape Architecture IV

Guo, Luo, Zhang

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The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

SPARSE/DENSE

TIGHT/VAST

CONTIGUOUS/PUNCTUATED

Doonan, Liebel, Hayner, Riolo

Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Landscape Architecture IV

Feng, MorenoLong, Zhang

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The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

Khoo, William, Van Dreason

Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Landscape Architecture IV

Akagawa, Kim, So, Villa

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Wang, Wang, Zhang

The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

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Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Landscape Architecture IV COW

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30 oF

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30 oF

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5,430

million tons of CO2

30 oF

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Li, Shen, Wang

EXPIRE IN 1 -2 DAYS EXPIRE IN 4 - 7 DAYS

EXPIRE IN 3 - 4 WEEKS

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Lyu, Xue, Zhang

The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

Harvard GSD Spring 2020 Landscape Architecture IV

Chen, Choi, Gu

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Phase 03 Design, Deployment and Disposition

Phase Three 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, etc.) that place into critical question the current market-driven means for providing and evaluating spaces in the city.

Phase Three departs from the prototypical urban assemblage to adapt it to site conditions. The site is a physical space that is defined by its geographical location, its environmental parameters, its infrastructural connections, its social networks, its human and non-human communities and its political constituents, among others. In this module, the urban assemblage enters into a form of dialogue with the existing conditions, until an optimum fit is achieved whereby the assemblage is responsive to external factors and the external factors are likewise influenced by the assemblage.

Where the deployment of the assemblage is not understood as a means to an end result but an urban landscape that is continually being remade by its changing external and internal factors.

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The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

South Boston

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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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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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Tending to Ground Eric Van Dreason, Natalie Khoo, Lauralee Williams 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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The Plan B Tiangang Lyu, Wenyu Xue, Zihui Zhang 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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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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Equal Ground Joanne Li, Tian Wei Li, Sophia Xiao, 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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The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

Dorchester

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Street Heat Caroline Craddock, Jaline McPherson, Ciara Stein 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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COLD HEART Reframing the Communal Refrigeration System

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.

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Manifesto

Cold Happiness|Leisure

Serve Yourself|Community

Live Edge|Street

Winter (December-February）

Treasure Underwater|Sea

Fall & Spring（October-December & February-April)

Outdoor

Outdoor

44-53℉

31-38℉

Room

Room

73-78℉

68-74℉

Freezer

Freezer

0℉

0℉

Refrigerator 34-38℉

Refrigerator 34-38℉

Refrigerator Motor 300-320℉

Refrigerator Motor 300-320℉

0’

Natural Surface

35-39℉

Pavement Surface

0’

34-41℉

Natural Surface

43-46℉

Pavement Surface

40-49℉

2’

2’

-2’ Depth

-2’ Depth

37-45℉

33-42℉

5’

5’

-5’ Depth

-5’ Depth

28-37℉

41-49℉

-12’ Depth

-12’ Depth

51-58℉

12’

21-29℉

12’

18’ Depth

18’ Depth

1913 Refrigerators for domestic use were invented

1700s

1790

Barrels or Steel Drums For Simple Root Cellars

The Ice House at Hampton Mansion

1800s The pre-Civil War ice house in Fredericksburg, Virginia

Natural Surface

35-39℉

-2’ Depth

37-45℉

In the late 16th and early 17th centuries Francis Bacon performed various experiments with burying fruits underground contained in barrels or stone pots with sand, stating that "burials in earth serve for preservation."

Hampton Mansion’s ice house made the Ridgely family able to serve ice cream in July with stored ice, an expensive and time-consuming commodity in 19th century America and Great Britain.

-12’ Depth

51-58℉

The inhabitants of early Fredericksburg enjoyed a cool drink during the summer hence the massive excavations referred to as ice houses. These massive ice boxes maintained an adequately cool temperature.

-5’ Depth

41-49℉

This spherical refrigerator by Dutch designer Floris Schoonderbeek is buried underground, keeping food cool without using electricity. It is based on traditional root cellars – spaces dug into the earth to preserve food and drink.

Modern appliances such as the humble fridge are nowadays very much taken for granted, yet fridges only became generally available for household use in the 1920s, which is really not that long ago Worldwide it is estimated that 40% of all foods require refrigeration, and 15% of the electricity consumed around the globe is used for refrigeration..

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Cold Heart Yiyang Li Tong Shen, Hao Wang 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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Delay, Deconstruct, Distribute 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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The Circular City Ayami Akagawa, Esther Kim, Olivia So, Gracie Villa 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. I n 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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Winter The Resting

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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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AMAZON.COM

MATTHEWS INTL

STONEMOR PARTNERS

$1 M

STEWART ENTERPRISES INC.

ROCKS OF AGES CORP

1-800-FLOWERS.COM

SERVICE CORP INTL

WALMART

HILLENBRAND, INC.

$

CARRIAGE SERVICE INC.

The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

$100 M $200 M $300 M $400 M $500 M $600 M $700 M $800 M $900+ M

CONCRETE

WOOD & STEEL BURLAP

EMBALMING FLUID, PAINT

Pesticides

C₈H₁₄ClN₅

C₃H₈NO₅P C₉H₁₁Cl₃NO₃PS C₁₅H₂₂ClNO₂

Formaldehyde CH2O

AS₂O3

Paint Chemicals Pb

Ni

Cd

Hg

Wood Preservative As

Mg

Cr

Zn

CuO CrO₃ AS₃O5 C₂₂H₁₄CuO₄

NH₃

Depth Concentration Concentration (half-life state)

Restless Accumulation

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Process uses 1/8 of the

Restful Deposition

energy needed for cremation One metric ton of CO2

Saves 30 gallons of fuel

saved each time process

in comparison to

is completed

cremation

Reduces cost to $5500

INPUTS ALFALFA medicago sativa

Nitrogen (N2)

30:1

131°F

WOODCHIPS

30 days

Carbon (C)

STRAW

THERMOPHILIC MICROBES

One Cubic Meter of Soil

Carbon Sequestration

CO2 CO2

Increased Minerals

Nutrient Cycling

Higher Presence of Soil Organisms Nematodes

N2 N2

CO2

N K

P

Mites

C

P

Balanced Soil pH 13

12

11

S Protozoa

P

N

K

P

C

S

Fungi

N P

K

P

Bacteria

C

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N2

O2

H2O

O2

9

H2O H2O

8

H2O H2O

N2

7

O2 N2

S

N2

H2O H2O

N2

N2

P

H2O

N2

10

N2

More Water and Air

6

H2O N2

5

N2

O2 O2

H2O

Increased Organic Matter

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The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change CO2

O2

CO2

O2

Resting Soil O (Humus) 0 to -5 cm

O2

N2

P

A (Top Soil) -5 to -25 cm

H 2O

Bacteria

K

Fungi

K

N2

O2

O2 N

B (Subsoil)

P

C

P

H 2O

S

Nematodes

-25 to -75 cm

C (Parent Material) -75 to -120 cm

New Geologic Layer

Protozoa

+0 m to -4m Development

Mg

Pesticides Formaldehyde

Casket CH2O C₃H₈NO₅P

AS₂O3

Pb

Wood Preservatives Paint Chemicals C₂₂H₁₄CuO₄

-1m

C₈H₁₄ClN₅

Pope John Paul II Park

Utilities

Neponset Drive-In NH₃

Hallet Street Dump -6 m

Urban Deposition

Landfill

O (Humus) 0 to -5 cm A (Top Soil) -5 to -25 cm Underlying Soil

B (Subsoil) -25 to -75 cm C (Parent Material) -75 to -120 cm Glacial Till

Glacial outwash Pleistocene age Aquifer

R (Bedrock) -5,000 m (thick)

Geologic Layer

Roxybury Conglomerate

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Nitrogen

Carbon (-)

Alfalfa Symbiotic N2 Fixation N2 N2

N2

N2

N2 N2

N2 Rhizobia (Bacteria)

Root Nodule

Hay

Collective

Bobcat Capacity 2 Cubic Yards of Soil

Capacity: 6 Loads Per Hour Total Soil Moved Per Hour

Hay is cut and packaged into bales, which are transported to the Recomposition Facility and used in the soil’s compost.

For Others

1/3 of a Cubic Yard Per Load

Organizations

Homecoming

Boston Public Schools Future Project Site #3

F.A.O.

L.M.D.

1

Revision Urban Farm

2

Urban and Community Forestry (Mass DCR)

Future Project Site #2

Ashmont Market Project Site (Current)

Boston Public Schools

Revision Urban Farm Recomposition Facility

Ingrained

Individual

Urban and Community Forestry (Mass DCR)

Hand Capacity Capacity: 200 Loads Per Hour

.05 of a Cubic Yard of Soil

Total Soil Moved Per Hour

Soil Moved Per Load

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The Rebirth

The Exchange

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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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East Boston

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Snow Bank Diana Guo, Runke Luo, Yuning Zhang Pablo Perez-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 semiprivate 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 reappropriated 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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Local Forest Coalition 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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Energy Sovereignty Chun Chen, Eun Soo Choi, Hyemin Gu Pablo Perez-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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Living Soil Laura Cui, Scarlet Rendleman, Ada Thomas 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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Resilient Efficiency Guanyi Wang, Ji Wang, Jinying Zhang Pablo Perez-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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Energy Multiplicity Lianliu Guo, Yifan Wang, Yuheng Wu Alex Wall

Climate change is closely related to energy production and distribution. However, under the nearfuture 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

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Final Exhibition

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The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

1a. Brittany Giunchigliani, Chelsea Kashan, Chloe Soltis 1b. Yiyang Li, Tong Shen, Hao Wang 1c. Ayami Akagawa, Esther Kim, Olivia So, Gracie Villa

1

1b

1a

2c

2b

2a

3a. Diana Guo, Runke Luo, Yuning Zhang

3b

3a

3b. Echo Chen, Michele Chen, Kongyun He 3c. Fabiana Casale, Yvonne Fang, Maria Ulloa 3d. Joanne Li, Tian Wei Li, Sophia Xiao, Ying Zhang 3e. Xin Feng, Angela Moreno-Long, Jiani Zhang

4a

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2a. Laura Cui, Scarlet Rendleman, Ada Thomas 2b. Chun Chen, Hyemin Gu, Eun Soo Choi 2c. Nora Chuff, Max Smith-Holmes, Kanchan Wali-Richardson 2d. Caroline Craddock, Jaline McPherson, Ciara Stein 2e. Kara Gadecki, Alana Godner-Abravanel, Polly Sinclair

1c

2e

3e

2d

3d

4e

4d

3c

4c

4a. Lianliu Guo, Yifan Wang, Yucheng Wu 4b

4b. Guanyi Wang, Ji Wang, Jinying Zhang 4c. Tiangang Lyu, Wenyu Xue, Zihui Zhang 4d. Matt Liebel, Annie Hayner, Sarah Doonan, Dominic Riolo 4e. Eric Van Dreason, Natalie Khoo, Lauralee Williams

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