Peter Rowe, Raymond Garbe Professor of Architecture and Urban Design and Harvard University Distinguished Professor

Yun Fu, Design Critic in Urban Planning and Design

A useful way of regarding adverse environmental effects of various forms of urban settlement is by way of a metabolic and systems view of the material aspects of such settlement. In short, to be able to re-write settlements in a manner that creates links between natural domains like the geosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere with commonly defined land use types and activities. The method to be adopted is a stock-flow model involving Sankey diagram depictions of water, energy and material flows from originating domains to spatial settlement production and waste management using available data, or in other words, from ‘cradle to end use and disposal’. As a proof of concept, three manners of settlement co-existence will be explored. They are compact urban settlement, peripheral development and informal settlement. Cases will be drawn from Paris, France, Boston in the US and Monterrey, Mexico.

Niall Kirkwood, Professor of Landscape Architecture and Technology and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs

REMADE aims to develop graduate design studio courses on the subject of the naturally occurring landscape as both a ground for advancing core knowledge on equity in climate change planning, as well as on developing practical design tools for city communities on sustainability and living with nature. Among these tools, the concept of the ‘climate change classrooms’ in the urban fabric will be developed and rethought. Site scale public spaces will be designed for access by all city residents and will provide climate change education as well as additional social and cultural amenities. The graduate studio course research will collaborate with existing researchers and organizations engaged with climate study and will advance understanding for local civic authorities and leadership, as well as local educational communities. The focus will be placed on naturally based approaches and the potential impact on climate equity and sustainability in Thailand.

Rachel Meltzer, Plimpton Associate Professor of Planning and Urban Economics

Extreme events, like the wildfires of California, can cause massive damage to the built infrastructure in their paths.  In rebuilding after the disaster, there are not only the material costs of re-erecting those structures, but risk assessments of any future event that could once again compromise or destroy those very same structures.  As we consider the planning and building of communities and infrastructures in the face of increasing climate change threats, like wildfires, the risk calculations, and who bears those risks, will be important considerations.  In this project, we focus on the risk calculations of doing business under the threat of massive wildfires, and how that informs the valuation of commercial properties in California. In addition, we assess how the increased risk from the fires is differentially borne by property owners, tenants, and consumers. Commercial activity is an important component of any municipality’s economic and social health, and we know very little about how the risk of wildfires affects the decisions to invest in and use commercial infrastructure.  For this study, we focus on retail commercial activity, as it provides clear delineations for risk calculations across the consumers and producers of those services. We then ask and test the following research questions: (i) how are wildfire harm and risk capitalized into commercial property values and rents?; and, to disentangle the mechanism of real estate price adjustments, (ii) how does wildfire harm and risk affect the type and intensity of retail services and productivity? Using longitudinal micro-spatial data on property leases and transactions, building features, establishments, and wildfire exposures, we exploit the conditional exogeneity of the wildfire events and very fine-grained spatial controls to identify the impact of wildfires on property prices, rents, and establishment viability.

Holly Samuelson, Associate Professor of Architecture

Aligning the timing of electricity demand with periods of clean generation is a key strategy in enabling the transition to a carbon-free electricity grid.  Yet this has not been a traditional goal of the energy analysis methods or building energy codes informing and governing building design. This talk explains these concepts through a case study of glass selection. We hypothesized that, as solar power generation capacity grows, contrary to current practices and building code requirements, a low solar heat gain coefficient (SHGC) on south-facing windows may not be the optimal design in, at least a subset of, electrified mid- and high-rise residential buildings in colder climates. As a case study, we simulated 13 permutations of glass properties in a prototypical apartment building in 19 US cities from mixed to very cold climate zones. We found, on average, a 37% increase in non-solar electricity demand when SHGC is optimized based on traditional goals. This large percentage suggests that glass selection is an important variable that requires careful consideration in an evolving energy context.  As a surprising finding, even considering today's electrical grids and traditional energy efficiency goals, the established practice of using low SHGC of south-facing windows was not optimal for our subset of tested buildings.

Martin Bechthold, Kumagai Professor of Architectural Technology, Director of the Master in Design Engineering Program

Juan Pablo Ugarte, Lecturer in Architecture

Why do building occupants make the choices they make when it comes to environmentally friendly or unfriendly actions? How do buildings themselves contribute to shaping these behaviors? This research project explores if, and how, visual, tactile, auditory, olfactory, haptic, and other spatial and material factors may covertly and indirectly sway building users towards more sustainable behaviors.   The sustainability-related behavior of building occupants has been studied extensively. Typical topics of research include data collection methods and related analysis frameworks, behavioral studies of window, lighting and space heating and cooling, and the quantitative modeling of human behaviors in numerical simulations, to name a few. These are all relevant topics, especially when considering the estimated potential for behaviorally driven energy savings, which is generally assumed to be in the range of 10-25 % for residential and 5-30 % for commercial buildings (Zhang et al. 2018). Buildings with little to no integration of data-driven control technology have a much higher potential for energy savings than those that include it (Sun and Hong 2017). With a US renewal rate of around 1%, and the technical, financial and political challenges of improving the existing building stock, this proposal is investigating how we might change occupant’s behavior through simple interventions in existing buildings towards more sustainable, energy-saving habits.  Efforts to understand and influence the motivations behind human sustainable behaviors —or lack thereof— have been conducted in contexts as diverse as marketing, retail shopping, tourism, and nutrition, to name a few. In design, the interest in these topics is compounded with a growing body of work in other behavioral aspects of building occupancy such as productivity, mental health, and creativity. Methods and theories to shape user behavior include behavioral priming (Bargh et al. 1996) from behavioral psychology, Nudge Theory (Thaler and Sunstein 2008) from behavioral economics, subliminal priming (Strahan et al. 2002) from the marketing industry, as well as system theory (Simon 1957). The effect of education on our behavior in buildings has also been studied (Carrico, Riemer 2011).  The proposed study investigates the potential impact of spatial and material factors on occupant behavior in relation to sustainable practices. We focus on what we tentatively call ‘implicit cues’ —i.e., aspects or portions of the built environment that may be used to promote specific behaviors in users in a covert fashion. These factors are different from explicit cues that include, for example, the known effect of revealing energy consumption data to occupants in order to encourage more mindful use of lighting, appliances, heating or cooling. The literature has largely focused on explicit cues, leaving much to be understood about the design-centered implicit cues!

Gareth Doherty, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture

This research project will enable three months ‘landscape fieldwork’ in Lagos, Nigeria focused on the materials, objects—and colors—that comprise Lagos and their thermal and environmental properties.1 The result will be three live projects in three sites in Lagos: the Makoko slum, the Brazilian Quarters (founded by returned enslaved peoples), and the exclusive neighborhood of Victoria Island. These live projects will demonstrate to Lagosians how color can change perceptions of the built environment and adaptability to the effects of climate change. The project builds upon a 2021 CGBC grant that investigated the relationship between urban colors and the adaptability of Lagos to challenges posed by the increased temperatures associated with climate change. The previous project developed a cross-disciplinary methodology to evaluate urban colors and associated environmental potentials through an innovative mix of mapping techniques, remote fieldwork, computational analysis, data visualization, precedent studies, and design imagination. Color is rarely considered outside purely aesthetic considerations. Focused on Lagos, but applicable across African cities, the proposed second phase of the project will allow the PI to live in Lagos for three months. This immersive experience will facilitate the implementation of the “Chromatic Resilience Framework.” The CRF from the previous grant aims to design opportunities to change Lagos’s environmental performance through color from a diversity of perspectives: artistic, cultural, scientific, spiritual, and spatial.

Craig Douglas, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture

Malkit Shoshan, Design Critic in Urban Planning and Design

Rosalea Monacella, Design Critic in Landscape Architecture

The aim of this project is to question how energy transition might allow us to reimagine landscapes of extraction, production, transmission, consumption: repair them on the one hand, and/or repurpose, rewire, and decentralize them for renewables while exploring issues of ownerships and governance, such as the commons. The research project is conducted at four scales of enquiry, including: extraction infrastructure (oil fields, mines, and fracking), energy production infrastructure (power plants, refineries, solar and wind farms), transmission infrastructure (grids and pipelines), and consumption infrastructure (the home, community, and neighborhood).

Martin Bechthold, Kumagai Professor of Architectural Technology

Zachery Seibold, Design Critic in Architecture

Our aesthetic preferences are determined by a multitude of cultural and personal factors, but how exactly these preferences evolve remains largely unclear. Digital and other media certainly play a major role in shaping our taste, as does education, to just name a few. The present study seeks to understand the degree to which our aesthetic preferences are influenced by the importance we attribute to sustainability. We focus on materials used on interiors as the immediate interface between people and the physical world of buildings. The study is conducted in two parts: first we evaluate the degree to which study participants can accurately estimate the degree to which various typical interior materials are sustainable – the latter is quantified through a life cycle analysis. In a second step we then assess how the aesthetic appraisal of materials is influenced by their perceived sustainability.

Holly Samuelson, Associate Professor of Architecture

This paper suggests that passive building design measures can play a significant role in shifting the timing of electricity demand to take advantage of solar power. As a case study, we tested the Solar Heat Gain Coefficient (SHGC) of south-facing windows and used building energy simulation to compare two design objectives: 1) minimizing annual electricity demand, 2) minimizing annual electricity demand unmet by instantaneous solar power. We simulated 13 permutations of SHGC in a prototypical apartment building in 19 US cities from mixed to very cold climate zones. We found that in colder climates the maximum SHGC prescribed by current building codes may be too low for minimizing annual energy use in an electrified building (a potential problem already today). Further, we found that in mixed-to-cold climates, to take advantage of solar power, the optimal SHGC must be even higher. Results show the optimal glass selection under the two objectives tested is significantly different and on average there is a 37% increase in non-solar electricity demand when SHGC is optimized based on simple annual energy use. These results show that the choice of energy-related building-design objectives matter if we recognize that all kilowatt hours saved do not have equal importance.

Carole Turley Voulgaris, Assistant Professor of Urban Planning,

Elizabeth Christoforetti, Assistant Professor in Practice of Architecture

Scholarship on green building for housing has generally focused on construction methods, materials, and energy efficiency (Yudelson 2010; Li et al. 2021) with less attention paid to what have been called the three most important characteristics of a property: Location, location, location. It has been well-established that residential location can have a large impact on household travel behavior (Ewing and Cervero 2010; McCormack and Shiell 2011; van de Coevering, Maat, and van Wee 2021; Boarnet and Wang 2019). Can a housing development truly be “green” if its location requires residents to maintain a carbon-intensive, car-oriented travel profile? We propose to develop a set of parcel-level, location-based metrics that represent various dimensions of housing sustainability, including access to open space, access to low-carbon transportation options, and likely commute-generated vehicle miles traveled for parcels across Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. We will also develop a separate set of parcel-level metrics to describe likely housing affordability and the feasibility of housing development. Using these metrics, we will develop an interactive tool that will allow users to specific the relative value or weight they place on affordability, sustainability, and feasibility to identify a set of optimal locations for infill housing development, based user specified values. We will apply this tool to answer three questions:

• Research Question 1: To what degree to does maximizing location-based housing sustainability require trade-offs in terms of housing affordability and/or development feasibility?
• Research Question 2: Do LEED-certified housing developments in Allegheny County have better location-based sustainability than housing developments that are not LEED certified?
• Research Question 3: What relative values placed on location-based sustainability, affordability, and development feasibility are implied by the pattern of housing development within Allegheny County over the past ten years?

Gareth Doherty, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture

This project researches the relationship between urban colors and the challenges posed by the increased temperatures associated with climate change. It proposes to comprehend the dynamics of urban colors and examine how they interact with the built environment and human activities in the urban ecosystem. To create more resilient cities, we need to understand urban chromatic values better and this project will do so using Lagos, Nigeria, as a living laboratory. Employing remote fieldwork, precedent studies and design imagination, we will examine the thermal and environmental properties of the materials that constitute Lagos’ colors and create a dossier of urban colors and associated design strategies suitable for Lagos.  Designers and planners rarely consider color outside purely aesthetic or metaphorical concerns. We expect sustainable cities to be green cities, but green is appropriate for temperate climates. To be good to the environment is often considered ‘green,’ but outside the temperate world, urban greens are often not very green from an environmental point of view due to the resources needed to maintain green, such as water and chemicals. How green should non-temperate, non-Western cities be? The solution is in not just having green, but other colors too. The first phase of the project will evaluate the environmental properties of a selection of Lagos’s various colors, where the rusts of corrugated tin roofs and the terracotta earth sit alongside yellow buses and taxi cabs. The project’s second phase will catalog a selection of Lagos’s primary colors, review innovative precedents that use color to effect environmental change, such as the City of Cambridge’s efforts to green the city though the tree canopy, New York’s efforts to paint roofs white to deflect heat, and Los Angeles’s efforts to color highways light gray to reduce surrounding temperatures by up to 10 degrees. We will also investigate historical precedents, such as Reykjavik’s multi-colored roofs and the changing roof colors of Chinese cities.5 The third phase will imagine and propose landscape architecture and urban design strategies to counter the effects of increased urban temperatures in Lagos in the future.

Pablo Pérez-Ramos, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture

This project departs from the consideration that oases are the most extraordinary example of the capacity of landscape architecture to sustainably transform the material conditions of the environment into desired ones. Each oasis is designed to reverse the entropic tendency of the desert. A little depression is excavated on the sand, a simple fence made of dried branches is built around the depression, a small palm-tree is planted inside. The depression collects some water through gravity, the water helps grow the tree, the shadow of the tree protects the ground moisture from solar radiation, the fence of dried branches protects both water and tree from the wind and the sand it carries. A positive feedback loop has been triggered: a simple landscape architecture device able to regenerate and project itself into the future with the aid of a small but continuous input of maintenance. This simple scheme is aggregated and replicated over vast extensions of land in some of the most arid regions of the world. The scale is different, but the principle is the same: an initially small reconfiguration of the material conditions of the environment, so that some of the energy running through it is caught in a feedback loop that eventually leads to a profound transformation of those initial material conditions: to the production of a fertile niche, almost self-sufficient, and in sharp contrast with its environment. The redundancy of these agronomic techniques over the preexisting geomorphological structure of the land yields a relatively limited number of landscape patterns that are often replicated across distant regions of the world.

Craig Douglas, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture

The research proposes to develop a model to capture, visualize and understand the atmospheric conditions of the network of open living landscape spaces that pervade the urban fabric utilizing emerging sensor technologies capable of continuous in-operation monitoring. The intention is to gather data specific to dynamic environmental parameters (such as solar and infrared radiation, air temperature, humidity, wind speed, carbon dioxide levels and significant air pollutants), to build a dynamic visual model capable of translating and visualizing the data in space and time. The goal is to make it possible to analyze the complexity of the landscape system and identify its propensities in the shape of its key operational characteristics in relationship to built form. The work aspires to understand the impact of the composition of outdoor spaces on the energy efficiency of building operation, and understand the atmospheric agency of the landscape to inform the design of spaces that contribute to the sustainability of the city and improve the health and well-being of its citizens. The challenge of energy efficiency and creating a healthy environment for a city’s inhabitants exist in establishing innovative ways to design and manage the thermal performance of the indoor and outdoor spaces of the urban fabric, and their interconnected relationship. This proposal recognizes it is ‘an imperative for the development of new observational strategies that are linked directly to innovative modelling approaches that directly address the most potent feedbacks in the climate structure. Because it is the feedbacks in the climate structure that set the time scale for irreversible change. The physical composition of the urban fabric acts to absorb, produce, and trap heat resulting in higher sustained temperatures 1-3 degrees (Celsius) warmer than neighboring rural areas. Heat generated in the city, including waste heat, is trapped along with air born pollutants generated by vehicles, transport infrastructure, commercial enterprises, and industry. Subsequently this condition adversely affects water and air quality, and the health and well-being of its citizens. Energy demands simultaneously rise due to the prolonged and increased use of mechanical ventilation and air conditioning in response to the hotter temperatures that strain energy resources and further contribute to the production of global emissions. Harvard’s Sustainability Plan to ‘maintain at least 75% of the University’s landscaped areas with an organic landscaping’ is commendable, however its contribution to sustainability could be augmented through an understanding achieved by measuring its performance to inform more effective landscape strategies and the potential to affect the built environment, including the environmental management of its buildings.

Ann Forsyth, Ruth and Frank Stanton Professor of Urban Planning

Jennifer Molinsky, Project Director, Housing and Aging Society Program

As communities across the U.S. seek to enhance their resiliency in the face of challenges posed by climate change, older adults are a particularly vulnerable population. As in most countries, the U.S. population is aging, with the population 65 and over expected to increase by more than 30 million people in the next 20 years to a total 79 million. The population aged 80 and above will double in that time. By 2035, one in three US households will be headed by someone 65 or over, and one in five by a household aged 80 or over (JCHS 2016). Most report wanting to age in their “own” homes whether the home of their middle years or one they move to in retirement. Unfortunately, many of these homes are vulnerable to problems associated with climate change. The situation is echoed around the world. This proposal will explore two key questions: What are the most important connections between aging, housing, neighborhoods, and climate change? What are the important gaps in knowledge where Harvard and the GSD would have potential to make a contribution?

Holly Samuelson, Associate Professor of Architecture

Local and state governments find it challenging to adopt aggressive residential building codes that require investment in energy efficiency upgrades beyond those with a reasonable payback. Thus, the progress towards a more energy efficient housing stock is limited by economic considerations that often only account for direct utility savings. A widely discussed solution is to look beyond energy costs and consider other impacts of energy saving strategies that affect their financial attractiveness. In this paper, we considered the case of a public housing project in Phoenix, AZ, and used several tools to calculate different economic, environmental, and health metrics associated with three levels of energy efficiency. Our result shows that while the payback calculated from direct energy costs may not be attractive, other savings should be considered. For example, we found that avoided health and climate costs can total around 40% of the direct utility savings. In addition, we quantify how energy saving strategies can cool the neighborhood, make buildings more resilient to heat, improve indoor air quality, and reduce the probability of airborne disease transport, all of which can be translated to avoided costs.

Grace La, Professor of Architecture

Erika Naginski, Robert P. Hubbard Professor of Architectural History

Environmental implications ground twelve student projects -- the focus of an exhibition at the Harvard GSD (Fall 2022) – that were the outcome of a studio and seminar jointly taught by the designer Grace La and the architectural historian Erika Naginski. Our project developed the folly as a typological springboard for coalescing formal creativity with sustainable imperatives. Whether at the scale of the structure, garden, or machine, the folly is a playful moniker in which the useless, extreme, theatrical, and daring are made to intervene in both intimate and civic spaces. With fantastical properties in mind, we used the folly opportunistically as a vehicle to foreground issues involving ecologics, environmental processes, and sustainable innovations. For us, the folly offered a means to translate theory into practice; by leveraging its discursive status, diverse scales, and programmatic flexibility, we created a space of design experimentation in which to explore the behavior of materials, the potential of first principles, and the evaluation of sustainable consequences.

Carole Turley Voulgaris, Assistant Professor of Urban Planning

State, local, and private-sector policies have created an increasing need to estimate site generated vehicle miles traveled for existing and proposed developments, but no established method exists for this purpose. In this paper, we review existing applications and methods for estimating site-generated vehicle miles traveled and ask how much influence the choice of methodology might have on such estimates. We propose a set of four plausible methods for estimating site-level trip generation and three for estimating average lengths of site-generated trips. Combining these yields twelve methods for estimating the site generated vehicle miles traveled. We apply these methods to estimate trip generation, average trip length, and total VMT generated by eight existing office sites in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Wasatch Front Region of Utah. We find that trip generation estimates and trip length estimates vary widely, with greater variation in trip generation estimates. This variation is magnified when the estimates are multiplied to produce site generated VMT estimates, with the minimum estimate at a given site ranging from four to 16 percent of the corresponding maximum. We conclude with a call for further research to develop a site-level VMT estimation method that prioritizes consistency, cost-effectiveness, closeness, and conservatism.

Andrew Witt, Associate Professor in Practice of Architecture

Jonathan Grinham, Lecturer in Architecture and Senior Research Associate

Achieving low-carbon design requires energy-matching strategies for heating and cooling. Water-based thermal regulating devices, such as radiant cooling and heating systems, provide an opportunity to achieve significant energy savings, peak demand reduction, load shifting, improved indoor air quality, and thermal comfort improvements compared to conventional all-air systems. As a result, the application of these systems has increased in recent years. These devices achieve reduced primary energy consumption by delivering cooling loads using large surfaces that exchange energy directly with occupants through radiant heat exchange. However, limited research has addressed how increasing the surface area available for convective heat exchange will improve the thermal performance of these devices. Here we propose research to develop a pilot study of a novel, high surface-area radiant cooling device that achieves required cooling loads using a low-temperature gradient, that is to say, working with a water temperature that is close to the temperature desired in the target space. The ability to deliver cooling at a lower temperature gradient has two benefits. First, the lower surface temperature of our device can reduce primary energy consumption and improve the chiller coefficient of performance. Second, when coupled to natural ventilation in buildings, the lower temperature gradient results in a higher temperate at the surface of our novel device, in-turn lowering the probability of condensation, which increases annual hours available to naturally ventilate a building.

Rosalea Monacella, Design Critic in Landscape Architecture

Craig Douglas, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture

Jill Desmini, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture

This project builds on the first stage of work that culminated in the exhibition titled ‘Energy||Power; Shaping the American Landscape’ at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design Loeb Library in 2020.  This work explored the acute obligation to upgrade and expand the electrical power grid to meet the demands of growing urban communities, and simultaneously address global implications of climate change that require a re-thinking of these infrastructures to inherently hold a capacity for adaptation, and concurrently serve as the modulating organizational structure of the urban fabric. Much of the U.S. energy system predates the turn of the 21st century. Most electric transmission and distribution lines were constructed in the 1950s and 1960s with a 50-year life expectancy, and the more than 640,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines in the lower 48 states’ power grids are at full capacity. This design research pursues the creative potential that is to emerge through a study of infrastructure’s capacity to directly inform the shape of the urban fabric of the city, and the possibility to affect its agency in response to the need for cities to respond to future environmental, technological, economic, and social challenges.  The aim is to develop alternative urban assemblages as deployable prototypes that incorporate the territorial consequences at a regional scale in order to shift the structure of the city to a position of accountability for its own power and water consumption at the scale of the city and concurrently at the broader region from which its resources are harvested. This next phase of the work proposes to collect, capture and disseminate the first stage work of the exhibition into a printed publication for distribution and a one-day symposium to extend and share the work through the active engagement of key researchers, practitioners, and stakeholders with the larger design community.

Martin Bechthold, Kumagai Professor of Architectural Technology

Daniel Tish, Instructor in Architecture

Reducing the embodied carbon footprint of the construction industry is paramount to delivering an impactful response to the climate crisis. A promising new avenue to reduce the embodied energy of the built environment is the development of new algae-based biomaterials. Algae take up CO2 during photosynthesis and require minimal processing. The technology could contribute to transforming the built environment into a carbon storage device, sequestering carbon in the material itself and holding it for the lifetime of the building. This project is a research collaboration with a team of material scientists at Caltech, led by Professor Daraio, who are developing this algae-based biomaterial. At the GSD, the focus has been on the development of novel fabrication processes and applications for this material in the built environment. The research broadly asks how we might fabricate components for buildings’ living materials. How can we overcome the challenges of working with materials with active behaviors, and what new efficiencies and opportunities might this new material paradigm offer?

Niall Kirkwood, Professor of Landscape Architecture and Technology

This paper focuses on the possibilities for cities and their hinterlands to progress economically and culturally through advancing highly modern industrial manufacturing and production in concert with the environment and the changing forces in the contemporary urban landscape. I refer to this as the ‘Fifth Industrial Revolution’ and I will explain the term and its derivation but suffice to say that it sits uncomfortably with and challenges much of my own previous research work by demanding that the post-industrial city and its landscape be considered an interim step in the evolution of the site rather than a terminal point both developmentally and ecologically. It is also I believe where the fields of architecture, urban design and landscape architecture can lead through the design, industrial ecology and nature.  This is a research effort that is ongoing in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, it is still in need of continued intensive effort and study and it is worth noting that it overturns many of the Department of Landscape Architecture’s previous positions related to the role of ecology in design, the place of industry in the city landscape (usually swept away along with jobs to make room for verdant parks and waterfront promenades), as well as the source of design ideas for landscape designers and planners.  I want to suggest that it looks to the interrelationship of the technical, the humanistic and the symbolic through the collective ideas of work, energy and city form. It engages with advanced manufacturing as a vital agent in shaping a new form of a city landscape or at least in opening up questions regarding the tools of industrial ecology and industry’s role in continuing to be a force in society. We can urge on behalf of urbanity and the development of ‘smart cars’, ‘driverless cars’ and ‘compact folding cars’ but cars still need to be manufactured and who does it, where and how and can it ever be considered sustainable? This paper presents the nature of industrial work in the City as it is defined now and may emerge in the future and the role of design in leading the planning and design implications of this type of manufacturing practice. This addresses initiatives developed at Harvard crossing between the fields of industrial ecology, environmental engineering, and the design and planning disciplines that I will endeavor to show through the process and results of research carried out in the Summer of 2019  The subtitle of the paper is titled- Co-Opting Urban Industrial Symbiosis for Urban Resilience and is focused on the City of Ulsan and hinterlands, (population of 1.1 million) located in the south-eastern part of the Republic of Korea where established fabrication zones, industrial complexes and civic residential neighborhoods are all located within an intense natural setting of coastal shorelines, mountains and meadows and are to be rethought and remade over the next decade. I want to suggest how the basic elements of the city (land, water and infrastructure) integrate within the Ulsan industrial and civic culture to produce a modern city industrial landscape that takes account of the shifting collective concerns of public and private agencies and companies.

Gareth Doherty, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture

In the Arabian Peninsula, public spaces are often most used after darkness falls and the temperatures with it. As a result, public spaces are often illuminated well into the early hours of the morning. This proposed research project will ask how, rather than fighting the night, designers can work with darkness to create socially and culturally acceptable public spaces? One aim of this proposal is to improve energy-saving in the Arabian Peninsula through more efficient design with darkness, taking more advantage of cooler nighttime temperatures and remediating lighting needs. A secondary aim is to conduct field research on the topic of nocturnal public spaces through a Design Anthropology seminar.

Rosalea Monacella, Design Critic in Landscape Architecture

Craig Douglas, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture

Jill Desmini, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture

This project builds on the first stage of work that culminated in the exhibition titled ‘Energy||Power; Shaping the American Landscape’ at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design Loeb Library in 2020.  This work explored the acute obligation to upgrade and expand the electrical power grid to meet the demands of growing urban communities, and simultaneously address global implications of climate change that require a rethinking of these infrastructures to inherently hold a capacity for adaptation, and concurrently serve as the modulating organizational structure of the urban fabric. Much of the U.S. energy system predates the turn of the 21st century. Most electric transmission and distribution lines were constructed in the 1950s and 1960s with a 50year life expectancy, and the more than 640,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines in the lower 48 states’ power grids are at full capacity.01 This design research pursues the creative potential that is to emerge through a study of infrastructure’s capacity to directly inform the shape of the urban fabric of the city, and the possibility to affect its agency in response to the need for cities to respond to future environmental, technological, economic, and social challenges. The aim is to develop alternative urban assemblages as deployable prototypes that incorporate the territorial consequences at a regional scale in order to shift the structure of the city to a position of accountability for its own power and water consumption at the scale of the city and concurrently at the broader region from which its resources are harvested. This next phase of the work proposes to collect, capture and disseminate the first stage work of the exhibition into a printed publication for distribution and a one-day symposium to extend and share the work through the active engagement of key researchers, practitioners, and stakeholders with the larger design community.