and design to a broader spectrum of interpretation. We seek to challenge the barriers to the field, and question the design and real estate disciplines’ current positions, conventional approaches, scope, and values. Taught by myself and Gene Kohn, the Global Leadership course for Spring 2014 enrolled 22 students with a wide range of academic backgrounds, professional orientations, and skill sets—real estate, economics, finance, urban design, planning, architecture, and landscape architecture. Two vastly dissimilar projects and site settings were intentionally selected for the course: one a waterfront redevelopment in Boston and the other along the southern axis of a new business district in Guangzhou, China. Divided into groups of two or three, the students were assigned by lottery to work on one of these two projects throughout the semester. Although the scale, location, and programs were different for the two sites, students were guided with parallel dialogues and orientation sessions to confront the relationships between real estate and design, and to conflate the external realities of macroeconomic trends, cultural shifts, regulatory constraints, and real estate capital market requirements into well-informed design strategies and development proposals. This process helped to inspire a greater sensitivity toward purpose, context, external demands, and the urban built environment, and a striving to enhance the intellectual and physical dynamism between real estate and design.
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Bing Wang
In the complex and intricate realm of the built environment, thoughtful and deliberate interaction between the once partitioned real estate and design fields is positively influencing the ultimate quality, form, scale, and economic sustainability of the global urbanism. Indeed, the increasingly multidimensional nature of real estate development raises questions about whether students and professionals trained separately in traditional real estate or design studies will be well prepared to embrace multifaceted risks and to successfully lead as practitioners or thought leaders. The pedagogical belief of the Global Leadership in Real Estate and Design course, not unlike that of the Master in Design Studies Real Estate program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, is that there must be convergence and integration in the teaching and study of real estate and design, especially through underlying research, design studios (the equivalent of field studies) methodology and production processes, cross-functional case studies, and exploration via thematic and multifaceted analyses (whether based on design or a spreadsheet). This pedagogical approach has not been addressed adequately within the existing professional and academic environment or in the literature, which have continued to uphold the convenient segregation of these vertical, one-dimensional domains rather than championing an integrated interdisciplinary or holistic approach. Thus the GSD Global Leadership course aims to expand the study of the intersection between real estate