GSDSP2019_ Near-Future City Studio Book

THE NEAR-FUTURE CITY Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change Spring 2019 Studio Compendium

Landscape Architecture Core IV STU 1212 Spring 2019 Harvard GSD

The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

Harvard GSD Spring 2019 Landscape Architecture IV

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

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Harvard GSD Spring 2019 Landscape Architecture IV

Table Of Contents Course Description

005

Teaching Team

013

Modules

033

Preterm

035

Module 01

055

Module 02

065

Module 03

079

Module 04

093

Module 05

107

Final Exhibition

113

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The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

Harvard GSD Spring 2019 Landscape Architecture IV

Course Description

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The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

Harvard GSD Spring 2019 Landscape Architecture IV

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Course Description The Near Future City Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

This is the fourth and final semester for the core Landscape Architecture sequence. It questions ways in which we can design urban assemblages for the city during moments of deep and rapid transformation. The assemblages are explored as a basic “DNA” of the city in which urban, landscape and ecological elements are intertwined to imagine new ways of habitation for both human and non-human constituencies.

The urban assemblage considers the city as comprised of multiple heterogeneous parts and networks, intertwined with the less tangible metabolic and material processes, that describe the nature of the city through its emergent and indeterminable characteristics. The assemblage is multi-scalar and subject to forces that range from the local to the global.

The Near Future is now, very soon and not yesterday, nor somewhere in the inconceivable future.

Thus, this studio on the “Near-Future City” seeks to explore new urban assemblages and paradigms for the city that address present inequities and insecurities (as well as predicted future ones) and are not solely dictated by market economies or singular political institutions and their values.

This work on the Near-Future City explores multiple tensions and ways of living that question our current modes of habitation.

This is an opportunity to speculate on a “Near-Future City” that considers the city as a thick ground condition, one that describes a set of complex systems characterized by gradients between the static and the dynamic. Through this thick ground, students will develop an understanding of the past and present city and how it can adapt to future conditions.

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.

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The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

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.mFinally, in the last phase, students negotiate the formation of their assemblages in a sector of Boston.

Through this work, students addressed one of the broader themes of the studio— mobility, habitation and supply chains—which together provide focused criteria through which we can tackle the key elements and systems of the “Near-Future City”.

The studio was 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.”.

Phase One: Agents, Agency, Metabolic Flows and Material Processes Phase One: Agents, Agency, Metabolic Flows and Material Processes sets 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.

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To begin the design process, we identified key systems, materials and agents operating both within the studio themes and across the studio sites. We will develop indexical tools to map, relate and synthesize these critical readings of urban processes. And we will use this understanding, to frame a polemic relative to the future climate and inhabitation of the city.

Phase Two: Urban Assemblage of the ‘Near Future City’ Phase Two Urban Assemblage of the “Near Future City” In this phase we continued with the premise explored in Phase One to articulate and position it as the brief for the urban assemblage of the “Near-Future City.” We continued to identify the agents and processes of material ecologies. here we developed a project-specific catalogue of urban elements and their inherent principles and protocols for assembly, adaptation and mutation. Through the combination of proposed urban elements(s) we developed a suite of urban assemblages that inherently articulate the “DNA” of the “Near-Future City.” The urban assemblage was considered as a “thick ground” with tangible and intangible characteristics for responding to states of uncertainty at both the local and global scales. The assembly was tested in different situations, and the resultant variations will form a matrix of building blocks for the city. The matrices developed had morphological and performative characteristics that were driven by principles drawn from an understanding of planning, urban design, engineering, ecology and market economies.

Phase Three: Deployment and Disposition Phase Three: Deployment and Disposition returned to the project’s foundation, established in Phase One and grounded this intellectual premise by deploying the urban assemblages from Phase Two on site. In deploying the assemblages, we speculated 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 addressed 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 were 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 were foregrounded.

Projects tackled specific scenarios (social housing, community land trusts, commons) that place

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Harvard GSD Spring 2019 Landscape Architecture IV

into critical question the current market-driven means for providing and evaluating spaces in the city. The studio continued the investigation into climate change, resiliency and adaptation in the Boston region begun in the Core III studio. The focus turned to models for the “Near-Future City,� grounding prior investigations and extending the work along transects from the harbor inland to neighborhoods, commercial and industrial districts, and fresh waterways. Boston, as a greater entity with a long history of land-making, became a testing ground for urban models that address future scenarios of building, retrofitting, infilling, retreating and defending relative to climate predictions.

The physical and environmental vulnerability of the city were explored in conjunction with its social, economic and political risk factors.

East Boston

South Boston

North Quincy

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The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

Harvard GSD Spring 2019 Landscape Architecture IV

Teaching Team

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The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

Teaching Team

Coordinators Jill Desimini Rosalea Monacella

Instructors Danielle Choi Pablo Perez-Ramos Belinda Tato Alex Wall

Workshop Instructors Ernest Haines Amy Whitesides

Teaching Assitants Jiyun Jeong Varat Limwibul Danica Liongson Lane Rubin Davi Schoen Isaac Stein Amanda Ton Parawee Wachirabuntoon Tim Webster

Harvard GSD Spring 2019 Landscape Architecture IV

Teaching Team

Guest Workshop Instructors Arif Kornweitz.

Alexey Marfin Michiel Van Iersel Liam Young

Guest Lecture Michael Batty Anita Berrizbeitia Curtis Cravens Eric Hรถweler Rory Hyde Jesse Keenan Nina-Marie Lister Andres Sevtsuk Michiel van Iersel Amy Whitesides Liam Young

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The Near Future City: Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

Teaching Team

Guest Reviewers - During the Semester Anita Berrizbeitia Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich Sean Canty Tom de Paor Craig Douglas Sonja DĂźmpelmann Mariano Gomez Luque Stephen Gray Ernest Haines Gary Hilderbrand, Karen Janosky James Lord Jeffrey Nesbit Megan Panzano Rosetta Sarah Elkin Surella Segu Paola Sturla Hanne van den Berg Michiel van Irsel Emily Wettstein Amy Whitesides Seok Min Yeo

Harvard GSD Spring 2019 Landscape Architecture IV

Teaching Team

Guest Reviewers - Final Review Marie Law Adams Lorena Bello Gomez Anita Berrizbeitia Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich Joan Busquets J Cephas Gareth Doherty Craig Douglas Stephen Gray Steven N. Handel Gary Hilderbrand Rory Hyde Karen Janosky Bridget Keane Bryna Lipper Nina-Marie Lister Sergio Lopez-Pineiro Jeffrey Nesbit Megan Panzano Paola Sturla Michiel van Irsel Charles Waldheim Amy Whitesides Sara Zewde

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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.

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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 and Design Critic in the Landscape Architecture Department at Harvard University. She was an Associate Professor in the School of Architecture & Design at RMIT University serving as the Director of Landscape Architecture Program for 5 Years. 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. Her most recent publication titled Transitioning Cities: Low Carbon Futures is due to be 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 Primary Cities: Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra London, Tijuana, Mexico City, Puerto Vallarta, Boston, Ho Chi Minh, Shanghai, Singapore, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Rome, Changzhou, Wuxi, Suzhou, Chongqing, Beijing, Taipei, Copenhagen, Milan,

Harvard GSD Spring 2019 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.

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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.

Equity, Block by Block The project addresses how climate adaptation can mobilize an ideology of opportunity as opposed to paralysis and apocalyptic complacency. The proposal includes a dual approach of interventions at a masterplan and block scale to create an open-ended network that presents possible answers to questions of housing, labor and public space that is flexible and scalable. The proposal reframes opportunities and interests at the individual, household and the block scales to create mutually beneficial relationships between individual interest and community development, including the redesign of the protocols and rules of the real estate market by empowering the neighbors to be active players in the redefinition of their public space and urban landscape.

Social unity through food The near future city must begin to address our connections with the food system and our connections with each other. Food is a great social unifier - with it, we have the ability to share culture, identity, stories and space. Can the near future city promote more opportunities for socialization around food and the food experience? Can the near future city minimize the predominant physical-social isolation and provide the conditions for more connections?

Through a series of plug-in solutions, the project identifies spatial opportunities in the existing urban fabric to cooperatively distribute, buy, sell, prepare and consume food and start to change our relationship with it and with each other.

Urban Salina Every winter Boston imports tons of road salt from Atacama Desert in Chile creating a huge ecological footprint, taking up to 20% of the local budget allocated for transportation and posing a direct threat to the underground fresh water. This topic emerges as an opportunity with a series of urban interventions for gradually localizing and replacing winter de-icing salt as well as optimizing city’s salinity management as stimuli for urban regeneration. The proposal comprises environmental, economic and social tools and actions to reprogram the area and its future.

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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 2019 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.

In Muck: Two Linear Cities for a Wet Future, Warwin Davis, Kimberley Huggins, and Jonathan Kuhr offer a double infrastructural project to adapt to uncertain future conditions. The first, “Causeway” - Route 1A is partially elevated to become a structure to which both individual and clusters of buildings can be attached, and second, the future flooded areas to the South and North of Orient Heights become a series multi-faceted wetland “Guardian Neighborhoods.”

Xingyue Huang and Xinyi Zhou’s Timed Infrastructure: landscape as urban structure; Infrastructure as Public Space takes two sites, defined by water and transportation infrastructure, to explore how people appropriate public spaces. On the Massport Terminal under the Tobin Bridge and on a hydroformed Suffolk Downs, the temporal boundaries of public spaces separate different events, enabling different programs to form.

In Saturated City: new protocols for drumlin urbanism, Zoe Holland, Haey Ma and Yue Wu aim to recover a cultural connection to water by creating two types of urban pathway structures. Their vision of the near future city employs Orient Heights as a case study for “drumlin urbanization,” densifying vertically above and below ground, anchoring stormwater management, public space, and housing along these pathways.

Karissa Campos, Yoni Carnice, and Jena Tegeler take the position that we must orient the new city towards a future where cohabitation with the living nonhuman world is culturally and ecologically possible. With SLOW CITY: Emergence Idyll, Orient Heights in East Boston is densified to maximize the opportunity for encounters with fellow creatures, both desired and unexpected.

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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 2019 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 PĂŠrez-Ramos

Pablo PĂŠrez-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.

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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.

More specifically, “Opportunities in Obsolescence” focuses on the disuse of East Boston’s industrial fabric, proposes an ambitious phytoremediation program to remove contamination by spending time rather than money, and deals with the coordination of these decontamination processes and the reoccupation of these spaces by nonindustrial land uses. “Parasitize Amazon Urbanism” suggests the need to “domesticate” the investment potential of e-commerce giants like Amazon. It introduces a system of “Intermediate Delivery Centers,” which, in hybridizing Amazon’s requirements with other fundamental programmatic needs in the city, aims at the provision of a new network of social condensers. “Interstitial Urbanism” looks into the large amount of urban public space that will be liberated as a result of the more efficient circulation patterns of automated mobility, and speculates with the possibility of repurposing this system of spaces as both new infrastructural corridors and opportunities to increase the city’s programmatic complexity. Lastly, “Coalescing Epoch” targets different forms of contamination and the extreme compartmentalization that industry and infrastructure have brought to the area.

The project typifies a set of different urban border conditions, and, by editing topography, vegetation, and pedestrian circulation, transforms them into areas of urban interaction.

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 Mena Ahmed Sophie Elias Yujue Wang McKenna Mitchell Ellie Rochman UJ Song Camila Barbosa Alykhan Neky Chelsea Kilburn Andy Lee Xin Zhong

Jill Desimini Ariel Bi Simรณn Escabi Jonathon Koewler Hannah Chako Sydney Conaway Cecilia Huber Koby Moreno Alysoun Wright McKenna Mitchell Ellie Rochman UJ Song

Harvard GSD Spring 2019 Landscape Architecture IV

Rosalea Monacella

Belinda Tato

Colin Chadderton Benjamin Hackenberger Yun Tsai

Yuru Ding Michael Cafiero Lu Dai

Lamia Almuhanna Samuel Gilbert Edyth Jostol

Nan Yang An Sun Haoyu Zhao

Dana Hills Andrea Vasuke Hoxha

Roberto Ranson Ruiz Zeqi Liu Alexandra Distefano

Kira Clingen Carson Fisk-Vittori Shira Grosman

Pablo PĂŠrez-Ramos

Alex Wall

Micahel Ahn Dylan Anslow Connie Trinh

Karissa Campos Yoni Carnice Jena Tegeler

Hanh Nguyen Xijia Zhang Sijia Zhong

Zoe Holland Haey Ma Yue Wu

Laura Cabral Gem Phipatseritham

Kimberley Huggins Jonathan Kuhr Warwin

Xiuzheng Li Siwen Xie Xin Zhong

Xinyue Huang Xinyi Zhou

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Harvard GSD Spring 2019 Core IV Phase 02

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Modules & Student Work

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Preterm Workshop Urban Assemblages

The pre-term workshop was an introduction to the overarching conceptual agenda and the associated tools and techniques of the studio. In the workshop, we began 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 focused 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 began grounding it within the greater Boston region, a place vulnerable to the uncertainties related to the effects of climate change.

The pre-term workshop was broken down into two parts. The first part introduced 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 focused 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 looked at case studies derived from a range of historical ideas of the city. These cases describe specific settlement patterns which we will interrogate both related to the political, environmental, economic and cultural climate of their conception, and to the potential future scenarios of their speculated adaptation. We explored the relational qualities of the settlement units, breaking down the urban and ecological layers found within them. We also looked beyond the contained design to the metabolic flows and material processes which influence growth and decay. We identified the key human and non-human agents involved in these transformations. An exhibition, discussion and mini-symposium took place on the last day of the workshop (Friday). The purpose was twofold: to reflect on the initial body of work produced in the workshop; and to open the conversation to the key thematics of the semester-long design studio.

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Lee

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Moreno

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Song

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Song

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Koewler

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Liu

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Gilbert

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Koewler

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Wright

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Wu

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Wang

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Wang

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Tsai

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Phipatseritham

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Ransom

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Hollond

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Module 01 Metabolic Flows and Material Processes

Phase One: Agents, Agency, Metabolic Flows and Material Processes set the intellectual and spatial foundation for the subsequent work of the studio. We began 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 read the material and energy flows within a city. The metabolic model provided 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 identified key systems, materials and agents operating both within the three studio themes and across the three studio sites. We developed indexical tools to map, relate and synthesize these critical readings of urban processes, and we utilised this understanding to frame a polemic relative to the future climate and inhabitation of the city.

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

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Ahmed_Dou_Wang

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Clingen_Fisk_Vittori_Grosman

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Huang_Zhou

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Huggin_Kuhr_Davis

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Kilburn, Lee, Roynesdal

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Li_Wang

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Module 02 Urban Assemblage

Phase Two Urban Assemblage of the “Near Future City” aimed to develop a projectspecific catalogue of urban elements and their inherent principles and protocols for assembly, adaptation and mutation. Through the combination of proposed urban elements(s) we developed a suite of urban assemblages that inherently articulate the “DNA” of the “Near-Future City.” The urban assemblage is considered as a “thick ground” with tangible and intangible characteristics for responding to states of uncertainty at both the local and global scales. The assembly was tested in different situations, and the resultant variations formed a matrix of building blocks for the city. The matrices developed had morphological and performative characteristics that were driven by principles drawn from an understanding of planning, urban design, engineering, ecology and market economies.

The task of this module was developed as a catalogue of urban elements for the NearFuture City and combined these elements into an urban assemblage. This was 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 utilizing these elements to identify the DNA of your project’s urban Assemblage for the “NearFuture City.” The aspiration was 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, and mutation.

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Wei, Li, Wang

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Nguyen, Zhong, Zhang

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Song, Rochman, Mitchell

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Sun An, Nan Yang, Haoyu Zhao

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Elias, Wang, Ahmed

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Holland, Wu, Ma

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Moreno, Wright

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Kilburn, Lee, Roynesdal

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Campos, Carnice, Tegeler

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Bi, Escabi, Koewler

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Module 03 Urban Assemblages: Distribution and Variability Module Three aimed to develop a matrix of urban assemblages for the NearFuture City. The prototypical assemblage continued to be developed and refined, and ultimately tested against a range of potential conditions and scenarios. The basis for adaptation and variation came from the work on metabolic process and material flows. The aspiration was to translate and synthesize the metabolic flows and material processes into a proposed Urban Assemblage that describe an advanced DNA of the city and into a suite of manifestations of this Assemblage that demonstrate its inherent potential for distribution, adaptation, and mutation.

The formation of your project’s urban assemblage was guided by an understanding of site conditions; for example the projected topographic changes, aspect, orientation, plot size, key adjacencies, material potential, programmatic use, etc. In other words, the Urban Assemblage within this module continued to be prototypical in nature yet deeply informed by the characteristics of site relevant to your project. The modelling of the urban assemblage was highly specific and charged with as much information as possible for both its formation and adaptation. The idea was to speculate on a Near-Future City and its potential to inscribe alternative ways that we might live through the rewiring of current metabolic systems of the city. This took place through a critical reflection of the conceptual and formal objectives of the Urban Assemblage.

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Moreno, Wright

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Chako, Conaway, Huber

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Mitchell, Rochman, Song

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Ahmed, Elias, Wang

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Bi, Escabi, Koewler

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Ahn, Anslow, Trinh

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Clingen, Fisk-Vittori, Grosman

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Huang, Zhou

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Kilburn, Lee, Roynesdal

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Nguyen, Zhang, Zhong

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Module 04 Deployment and Disposition Phase Three: Deployment and Disposition returned to the project’s foundation, established in Phase One and grounded this intellectual premise by deploying the urban assemblages from Phase Two on site. In deploying the assemblages, we speculated on the potential spatial transformations of the physical site as well as the possible mechanisms required to bring a project to fruition. These included: regulatory parameters, political structures, economic and ecological systems and cultural constraints. Again, the studio addressed 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 were 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 were foregrounded. Projects tackled 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.

Module Four continued to develop the agents, metabolic processes, and material flows established in Module One and the elements and assemblages commenced in Module Two and developed in Module Three. The task of this module was to develop a series of conceptual and four-dimensional spatial models for the NearFuture City. The assemblage was no longer be prototypical but rather embedded within the city itself. Thus, the assemblage now interacted with and even mutates the DNA of the city that has been extracted and elaborated on in the prior phases of work. Its deployment is understood as happening over time as a sequence of formal configurations that are continually adapting and being remade. That deployment is considered as a set of conceptual and spatial relationships that exists with the urban assemblage and that of the site of deployment.

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Cabral, Phipatseritham

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Clingen, Fisk-Vittori, Grosman

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Nguyen, Zhang, Zhong

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Ding, Cafiero, Dai

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Dou, Li, Wang

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Holland, Ma, Wu

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Hackenberger, Ting Tsai, Chadderton

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Almuhanna, Jostol, Gilbert

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Campos, Carnice, Tegeler

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Bi, Escabi, Koewler

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Module 05 Communication: Modes and Models for Delivery This module focused on the synthesis and communication of the project across physical and temporal scales. The project was not diminished by this exercise nor the outcome be overwrought or needlessly clever. Multiple and non-linear narratives emerged with clarity and craft. The drawn, modelled, filmic, written and verbal portrayals of the project were made to match the intent and focused on how the spatial outcomes reflected the conceptual underpinnings. Ideas are somewhat easy to come by. It is the development and articulation of these ideas, and their depiction and communication that gives the depth and resonance of the ideas.

The projects presented as an exhibition, and it is in this module, that the exhibition contents, layout and apparati were designed and tested. All of the means of exhibiting should support the content, allowing the content greater presence and legibility.

The work responded to: a highly specific and charged proposal, refined from Module One: the crafted and encoded catalogue of urban elements from Module Two; a set of principles and protocols for variation from Module Three; and the deep socio-political and spatial grounding of Module 04. Each team presented a unique position for the NearFuture City, and articulated the spatial qualities of this vision through the continued development of the projects grounding and resolution and a carefully curated exhibition of the work introduced and refined throughout the semeste r.

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Final Exhibition

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EAST BOSTON

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Opportunities in Obsolescence Reinventing Industrial Redevelopment Michael Ahn, Dylan Anslow, Connie Trinh Pablo PĂŠrez-Ramos The near future city requires new forms of development that re-evaluate conceptions of risk as spatial limitations. This project proposes to imagine new adjacencies between human habitation and obsolete land uses in East Boston, many of which are former industrial sites. Urban residents can no longer avoid the interface of communities and contamination as a distant issue historically left for marginalized groups to confront.

The population in East Boston continues to grow yet affordable options have not expanded to meet demand. Instead, East Boston faces one of the largest eviction crises in the nation.At the same time, East Boston’s history reflects a privileging of industrial and infrastructural land use. Oil tanks, abandoned factories, and large highway networks fragment the landscape where people call home. Many of these contaminated lands are vulnerable to sea level rise and pose a great threat to essential infrastructure and water systems.

Sending our waste to third-party agents is no longer an option. This project proposes to redevelop industrial and vacant sites by choreographing remediation and development for housing. The interventions are phased to consider time and safety. Time to heal land in situ is prioritized over high-cost remediation strategies that require extensive hauling. Contamination is redistributed using remediation, drainage, and active transport to accumulate contaminants locally in designated spaces while opening cleaner spaces for immediate housing. As contamination continues to be remediated and fixed, habitation and recreation of newly formed open space is introduced with expanded connectivity and circulation. East Boston transforms from a mosaic of neighborhoods separated by obsolete industry into a unified city connected by much needed open space and housing.

Keywords: dwelling, remediation, recreation

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In/Above the Muck Two Linear Cities for a Wet Future Warwin Davis, Kimberley Huggins, Jonathan Kuhr Alex Wall The near future of East Boston will be one of varied, unpredictable grounds—messy, polluted, sloshy, in flux. Although we may be unsure of its timing and effects, regular flooding of the land around existing drumlin landforms requires that parts of the city be abandoned and reimagined. Our project consists of two linear settlement forms, one in and one above the wetness, that together provide a new model for urban life and work.

The first proposal is protecting access to the region by combining and elevating transportation infrastructure. A lifted Route 1A (“The Bridge”) will carry multiple transport forms while also offering opportunities for multiplanar habitation and public space and new platforms for conveying people, capital, energy, water, and waste.

This proposal enables a second: the westward migration of a productive and ecological wetland and a lower-density, cooperative neighborhood hugging the wetland’s winding border (“The Band”). In contrast to the hard infrastructure of the Bridge, the Band is a zone of coastal agriculture/aquaculture designed to adapt to changing water levels and whose inhabitants are the stewards of the new landscape (“Guardians”).

These new linear cities are constructed of architectural and landscape types that are positioned according to suitable ground conditions. Together they support a new urban metabolism that promotes shared space, communal living, multifunctional ecosystems, closed energy/waste loops, disciplinary synergy, research and experimentation, and adaptation. Their forms are expressions of this metabolism. They are plugged into new and existing grounds; they are unplugged, reconfigured, repositioned as they fail or become obsolete. They are juxtaposed, stacked, melded, and morphed. Grounds emerge as they are remediated; submerge as they are inundated. The proposals present a future city that is under greater stress but, as such, one that offers greater flexibility and more even access to the opportunities that change affords.

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Parasitize E-commerce Urbanism New Amazon “Intermediate Delivery Center” as Social Condenser Hanh Nguyen, Xijia Zhang, Sijia Zhong Pablo Pérez-Ramos Our proposal suggests the need to “domesticate” the investment potential of e-commerce giants like Amazon. It introduces a system of “Intermediate Delivery Center”, which, in hybridizing Amazon’s requirements with other fundamental programmatic needs in the city, aims at the provision of a new network of social condensers.

We redefined and translated the characteristic and condition of logistic network into near-future urban form to benefit both in ecological aspect and social aspect .The nearfuture “Intermediate Delivery Center” will emerge and parasitize into logistic network of e-commerce. “Intermediate Delivery Center” will respond to both local and global scales.

Keywords: parasitize, e-commerce urbanism, logistic network

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Timed Infrastructure Landscape as Urban-Structure; Infrastructure as Public Space Xingyue Huang, Xinyi Zhou Alex Wall The city’s extensive infrastructure is no longer enclosed by the urban administrative boundary. Access to all types of public transportation infrastructure embodies the most universal type of collective realm. While transportation nodes serve certain functions and fulfill particular kinds of program needs, they do not raise a sense of place. Can these spaces become new types of public places that allow people to appropriate them in different ways?

Our project explores four different temporal frameworks: continuous, fluctuating, episodic, and cyclical, which allow the emergence of temporal public spaces. We imagine these as having multiple identities depending on how and for how long they are appropriated – in other words, timed (temporal?) spaces.

Time is inherent in landscape. Temporal boundaries separate different events, enabling spaces of different programs to form, such as the continuous rise of sea level; the episodic appearance and disappearance of an inundated surface, the fluctuation of the flowering season of ephemeral wetlands in wet season, and the cyclical wax and wane of tide. The four types of temporal patterns allow one to imagine a new relationship between public space and infrastructure.

Relationship is probabilities – probability of ways of appropriation; probability of different types of landscape to form and transform; probability of urban forms emerging in different moments through time; probability of reversing the existing perception and construction of landscape and infrastructure, which sees landscape as (urban) structure, and transportation infrastructure as public space.

Our four sites include:

Bus stop

Roundabout

Massport and the Tobin Bridge: creating a pedestrian link between Massport

and Chelsea; the platforms; adding storage space; adding residential; Phase 1;

Phase 2

Suffolk Downs and the tank farm: reengineering of hydrological flows;

elements: bridges, gates, residential buildings; Phase 1; Phase 2 Keywords: infrastructure, timed space, indeterminacy

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The Hill is Alive!

Growing Creature Culture on the Drumlin Karissa Campos, Yoni Carnice, Jena Tegeler Alex Wall We must orient the new city towards a future where intentional co-habitation with the living nonhuman world is culturally and ecologically possible. The East Boston neighborhood of Orient Heights is redesigned with a kit of architectural, landscape, and habitat niche elements at a range of scales from the territorial movement of a snowy owl’s hunting ground to the seed of a pickleweed providing daily sustenance for a shortbilled dowitcher.

In the initial phase, we introduce housing and backyard retrofit options on individual parcels. These elements accommodate for animal movement and saltwater intrusion and open the backyard to new public formations. Over time these domestic landscapes will seep into citywide habitat infrastructures. As the water’s edge migrates onto higher ground, we seize the opportunity to densify the urban environment that provides for an aging population, incoming families, and migratory animals. In the second phase, larger scale strategies will implement experimental building and landscape types that respond to local climatic conditions to enhance diversity, comfort and accessibility for residents, both human and non-human. The new forms of habitation will deconstruct normative suburban landscapes to reconstruct surrealist encounters with the living world.

Keywords: co-habitation, empathy, eco-sensuality

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Interstitial Urbanism Activating relinquished street space in the near-future condition of autonomous mobility.

Laura Hennig Cabral, Gem Chavapong Phipatseritham Pablo PĂŠrez-Ramos This project is a speculative study of the treatment of relinquished street space as a result of the introduction of the autonomous vehicle to the streets of the near future city.

We undertook our research in East Boston and noticed that many residents are going to be affected by flooding due to climate change. Considering this and given the current housing crisis, we decided to dedicate a portion of the newly liberated street space to new housing construction. The street boundary stays the same but the area for vehicular use will reduce. The leftover space is where we will operate.

The project consists of two propositions at different elevations: one is affected by flooding and the other is located on higher grounds. Implementation will begin by reducing the existing area of the street that is at present entirely used for traffic circulation. The first phase targets urban areas that are affected by flooding. Following this development, and as water encroaches further into the city, development at higher elevations will begin.

Despite having operated in parallel, both projects address the critical role of urban infrastructure and reinterpret the role of architecture as a tool at the civic level. One considers the levee as a defense against climate change and the other absorbs existing street utilities as a defense against privatization.

Keywords: autonomous vehicle, liberated space, underutilized

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Saturated City New Protocols for Drumlin Urbanism Zoe Holland, Haey Ma, Yue Wu Alex Wall Our project aims to recover a cultural connection to water that has faded from memory through the predominantly utilitarian modes of engagement in the everyday lives of most Bostonians. Today increasing intensity and frequency of storm events and chronic inundation from sea level rise calls for a new confrontation with a water system long engineered into invisible functionality.

Our vision of the near future city employs Orient Heights, a residential community in East Boston, as a case study for this new type of drumlin urbanization. We have designed a system of vertical blocks which challenge the single use and surficial nature of this lowdensity residential neighborhood fabric by densifying vertically above and below ground, anchoring stormwater management, public space, and housing along these pathways.

The first phase of this drumlin urbanization deploys the connective stormwater retaining infrastructure which consists of hybrid step-terrace systems which create an urban topography in the form of this vertical block. New mixed use, multistory buildings develop on this axis, adjoining to the terraces. These urban topographies employ water as an inherit part of the public realm, shifting the paradigm from water management as a problem to water as a public amenity. The second phase relocates key community institutions such as schools, daycare, supermarkets, healthcare, commercial and service functions that support an urban life.

Lastly, these vertical blocks are linked by a central canal walk connecting the urbanized drumlin to the nearby Chelsea River waterfront and the Belle Isle marsh facilitating access via boat and solidifying water as a focal element of civic space.

Our new protocol for drumlin urbanization calls for active, exposed and engaging hydrological systems that frame not just utilitarian outcome but a new mode of dense hillside living.

Keywords: hillside, water, connection

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Coalescing Epoch

Xiuzheng Li, Siwen Xie, Xin Zhong Pablo Pérez-Ramos “Coalescing Epoch” targets different forms of contamination and the extreme compartmentalization that industry and infrastructure have brought to the area. The project typifies a set of different urban border conditions, and, by editing topography, vegetation, installation structures, public spaces, and pedestrian circulation, transforms them into areas of urban interaction.

Keywords: boundary, pollution, productive landscape

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SOUTH BOSTON

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Collective Decommissioning

Lamia Almuhanna, Sam Gilbert, Edyth Jostol Rosalea Monacella As revealed by a recent breakdown in conventional recyclable material management networks and by the ubiquity of plastics in the environment, the current modes of international waste trade and economically-driven recycling practices have proven insufficient in managing our output of consumer waste. We have decided that in order to address this global crisis, all plastic recyclable products should be locally managed. By shifting material flows away from a system that values waste based on its profitability in relation to capitalist consumption, we are instead storing the value within the local community and landscape, fundamentally repositioning the role of waste material, reducing reliance on one time use plastics, and initializing a cultural shift toward ingenuity, landscape stewardship, and community emphasis. We are proposing three strategies for mitigating historic waste and addressing material potential in the near future city: changing communal consumption habits and household material pathways, introducing an infrastructural level of urban stormwater management and metro forest plantings, and creating space for a knowledge generation that will contribute to new material economies. Through utilizing the neighborhood asset of Conley Container Terminal, South Boston is able to act as a site for landscape experimentation. Through a partnership between the underutilized infrastructure and the active community, a model for a new way of living and consuming can develop.

Keywords: cooperative, remediate, localize

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Pass the Potatoes, Please A Framework for Social Unity through Food Michael Cafiero, Lu Dai, Yuru Ding Belinda Tato We think that bringing food to the public realm has a great potential to resist the various modes of physical-social isolation and begin to unify an unsettled society.

The near future then becomes one where our public institutions are reactivated and reprogrammed, and our forgotten spaces transform into new social hubs. This network works not only to better improve food mobility and accessibility, but also dissolve physical barriers and promote spaces of gathering, cooperation care, and health. In the design process, we deploy mutualistic interventions that activate urban voids and existing public institutions to act as catalytic food infrastructures.

Keywords: gather, cooperate, care

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Encoding Colocation Redistributing Amazon’s Logistical Network for Ecological and Social Equity Dana Hills, Andreea Vasile-Hoxha Rosalea Monacella American tech companies powerfully shape our physical spaces, societal values and habits. The ingenuity behind Amazon’s logistics network is its ability to use information to respond to and also shape our consumer landscape with maximum operational efficiency.

In the near future city, we, as designers, redistribute Amazon’s wealth to increase the social, ecological and economic equity within our urban environments.

In March of 2021 a federal Act is ratified - the Resource and Land Use Efficiency Act. The Act requires us to rethink the structure, function and networks embedded in American urban spaces. As a mandate it creates subsidies to decrease the environmental and physical footprint of country’s wealthiest 10% of corporations. Within South Boston a community bank program is created which allows for residents and community members to apply for funds which implement projects inline with the Act. The implementation of the act manifests at several different scales of Amazon’s logistical network: regional fulfillment networks, urban data centers and lockers, down to the individual components of servers and shelves. Within these strategies the mandate of the Act is manifested within space and often encodes strategies that capitalize on coupling technology and ecological, social and economic systems generating new environmental relationships.

Keywords: encoding, colocation, network, multi-scalar

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Urban salina

An Sun, Nan Yang, Haoyu Zhao Belinda Tato Every winter Boston imports tons of road salt from Atacama desert in Chile creating a huge ecological footprint, taking up to 20% of the local budget allocated for transportation and posing a direct threat to the underground fresh water. This topic emerges as an opportunity with a series of urban interventions for gradually localizing and replacing winter de-icing salt as well as optimizing city’s salinity management as stimuli for urban regeneration.

The proposal comprises environmental, economic and social tools and actions to reprogram the area and its future. By decoding and rewriting the story of salt, we ask, could the opportunity of the near future city emerge from its metabolic history? Could the challenge from climate change be transformed into new material input? and Could the near-future city thrive from both local history and globalization processes?

Keywords: salt, recycle, cultivation

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Sherwood Forest A Post-Speculation Live/Work Landscape Colin Chadderton, Ben Hackenberger, Yun Ting Tsai Rosalea Monacella The ability of city government to leverage property value in the interest of creating open and public recreational space has been severely curtailed. In South Boston, land is being “banked” for future development by three institutional owners—the Gillette Company, Massport, and Cole Properties, LLC. These cases demonstrate the fragmentation of urban space into saleable properties at multiple scales—while Cole is involved in the development of dispersed residential parcels, Gillette has aggregated property where South Boston meets Downtown with an eye towards future high-rise development, and Massport retains contaminated sites along the shipping channel.

The development of a community land trust can act as a counter to the process of land banking by considering open space beyond its role as an amenity to marketable units.

By leveraging the work done on a piece of land in addition to the profit made from its development and sale through traditional means, we can more equally distribute the right to and responsibility for land. Profit capping requires enterprises such as Gillette, Massport, and Cole to consider the value of urban land beyond its one-time development and sale, unlocking the land for remediation and a spatial shuffle that allows for a densification of the urban ecological network and significant increases in community resilience through resident ownership.

The land trust unlocks vacant spaces for a series of interim uses such as storage and sale of trees and soil/compost in material banks, coworking spaces for office workers, the storage and management of data in data centers, and the remediation of contaminated land through the use of state and federal funds. These disparate enterprises are pursued under the direction of the community land trust, and the revenue can be used to support land trust activities. Private institutions of all kinds can leverage the community land trust to provide services for or employ the companies and people living in the community.

The land trust acts primarily to implicate private property interests in the generation of distributed community wealth. Profits are generated in cooperation with residents rather than extracted from them.

Keywords: land, labor, housing, time, the commons

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Equity Block by Block Climate Adaptation on the South Boston Berm Alexandra Distefano, Zeqi Liu, Roberto Ransom Ruiz Belinda Tato The project addresses how climate adaptation can mobilize an ideology of opportunity as opposed to paralysis and apocalyptic complacency. The proposal includes a dual approach of transformations at a master plan and block scale to create an open-ended network that presents possible answers to questions of housing, labor and public space that is flexible and scalable. The proposal reframes opportunities and interests at the individual, household and the block scales to create mutually beneficial relationships between individual interest and community development, including the redesign of the protocols and rules of the real estate market by empowering the neighbors to be active players in the redefinition of their public space and urban landscape.

Keywords: multi-scalar, value-interchange, civic-equity

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Right to Grow: A Manifesto Urban trees in the Expanded Field Kira Clingen, Carson Fisk-Vittori, Shira Grosman Rosalea Monacella Main question/argument: Countering the objectification of trees as ecosystem services by revaluing urban tree communities through expanding urban tree typologies and reconstructing notions of habitation The Right To Grow Trees have: The right to Light and Air - right to receive adequate sunlight to grow, mimicking Zoning Code’s Legal Light and Air; species protection bylaws/rules The right to Community- right to robust root network, trees cannot be physically isolated; plant communities not specimen species; plant male/female companion trees; shift hierarchy of streets: allow root community to prosper through a permeable surface The right to Care- right to soil health and non-aesthetic trimming; protection from wind, flood, drought; unimpeded area from utility infrastructure The right to Bear arms- allow canopy space to extend to full height and width unimpeded The right to Reproduction- right to pollinate, spread seed and bear fruit; plant trees with their male and female pollinating species; community monitoring/education on hand/ artificial pollination; bee hives and pro insect gardens The right to Age in Place- right to not be cut down prematurely The right to Freedom of Expression- right to not be cultivated or pruned to accommodate aesthetics or utility infrastructure The right to Privacy- right to areas protected from human use, through a gradient of only human occupied to only tree occupied spaces Last Rites- right to continue the life cycle of local tree communities by harvesting dead biomass and nourishing future trees through biochar These rights make up the Right to Grow framework.

This framework reconfigures the false urban binary between people and woody plants by establishing spatial rights of way for tree communities built around their lifecycles. Establishing an expanded space for living plant communities will challenge the prevailing simplistic list of street trees and planting conventions. These expanded typologies form empathetic spaces within cities that reframe conventions of habitation between people and woody plants. Stewardship techniques meld with urban forms to create a gradient across the built environment in service of existing and future tree communities. As cities extend across larger territories, this tree ordinance provides a framework for future tree communities, globally, that moves beyond ecosystem services.

Keywords: tree life-cycle, empathy, habitation

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NORTH QUINCY

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Abundancy + Redundancy Challenging Reductive Notions of Efficiency in Urban Infrastructure Koby Moreno, Alysoun Wright Jill Desimini In consideration of efficient single function stormwater infrastructural systems, we aim to challenge the reductive nature of efficiency, which strips infrastructure of redundancy in the event of failure. More specifically, our project proposes a habitat-based stormwater system for Quincy’s fabric, where residents and property-owners negotiate a collective patchwork of landscape strategies to absorb and infiltrate water.

In 2016, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a permit for stormwater management improvements in urbanized regions. Current remediation strategies emphasize upgrades to existing stormwater infrastructure, which leaves Quincy vulnerable to unpredictable property tax increases. In recognizing the depreciating life cycle of such infrastructures, this proposal seeks to expand the response to include informal systems capable of increasing their fitness and capacity.

Best practice by today’s metrics maintains the deployment of homogenous, overly engineered infrastructures. At a regional scale, these homogenous infrastructural systems provide spatial legibility but occlude the nuance of the urban fabric at a finer grain. At this finer grain, conduits and vessels for movement, stormwater capture, and program, demonstrate the potential of these spaces to function in a less reductive and more complex way. These conduits and vessels include soils, plants and animals, whose varying capacities for water infiltration, uptake, and evapotranspiration inform local water regimes as well as spatial conditions of habitat and program.

Our project proposes a new city agency to facilitate the qualitative and quantitative management of both land cover —forests, grasslands, wetlands—and stormwater, through a series of surface and subsurface manipulations. This agency, the Department of Ecological Planning, would partner with residents and the Nature Conservancy to define lowland and upland conditions and goals, set specific backyard corridors, and implement a series of owner-selected landscape types with built in performance metrics.

In envisioning the near future city, our objective is to expand upon the heterogeneity existing within Quincy as a means to build greater complexity, redundancy, and programmatic capacity back into the urban fabric. How can we reshape and rezone the city, not based on existing formal conduits, but rather through its informal routes and networks?

Keywords: efficiency, redundancy, capacity

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Watering Holes Social Infrastructure for the Near Future City Mena Wasti Ahmed, Sophie Elias, Yujue Wang Danielle Choi We propose to reimagine everyday life in the city through a transformation of water supply and sewer systems. In the near future city, water is recycled according to its level of purity as it flows from upland areas to lowlands, from high points to low points, or from the top floor of a building to the basement. This reduces the burden on stormwater and wastewater systems while creating new spaces for socializing around everyday water use activities such as bathing, laundry, or the carwash. As the city of Quincy, Massachusetts faces a crisis of failing water infrastructure, it is also becoming denser, more diverse, and increasingly multigenerational. We see an opportunity to use Quincy’s new water system as the driver for designing new forms of housing and public space that meet the needs of the city’s future population.

As we transform the everyday experience of water in residential and public space, what is the impact at the metropolitan scale? Boston’s regional water system is dependent on centralized channels for both clean water supply and wastewater management, sited at Quabbin Reservoir and the Deer Island Wastewater Treatment Plant. Rather than using inflexible, long-distance networks to carry water in one of two binary conditions -- pure drinking water versus blackwater -- the network for the near future city incorporates a branching structure with multiple inputs, outputs, and intermittent purification, carrying water at several different grades of purity and using the landscape to carry water where pipes are unnecessary.

Our reimagined water system will celebrate universal access to clean water, adequate housing, and public space as communal rights for the near future city, and will form the basis for a new social contract between municipalities, citizens, and ecological systems.

Keywords: water, infrastructure, community

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Backyard Frequencies Ride the Radio Wave Mckenna Mitchell, Ellie Rochman and UJ Song Jill Desimini The practice of landscape architecture inherently addresses issues of public wellness, working with environmental forces as its medium. We consider radio waves as one of these environmental mediums for design in the near future. Our project implements a formally conspicuous data easement corridor to develop awareness about the relationship between digital information and our daily rhythms. Through the manipulation of typical and atypical construction materials, a new public realm is built that arranges moments of peak connection to the digital world next to spaces of complete reprieve.

The easement is a narrow space, carved between plot lines, where landform, canopy and data conducting poles guide an alternative way for residents to move through the city.

In addition, the corridors provide connective tissue linking larger public landscapes, inserted into already existing City of Quincy owned land. These larger spaces are interior neighborhood hearths, physical spaces of socializing, where the online and in person realms co-mingle; and waterfront jetties, spaces of release, where fresh air and salt water can absorb personal data while offering a space of refuge within the daily routine.

Along the public easement corridors, we imagine a second expression of the interactions between digital connectivity and daily life. Here, in private yards and attached to private homes, a series of resident-driven insertions offer a suite of retrofit options to bring more or less data into the home. Unlike smart home technology and other app-driven affordances, these spaces—including the grandma’s kitchen, the science garden, the sleep capsule, and the green tea tub among others—are physical, spatial and material reflections of our constantly changing relationship to technology. We are not going to design an app to save us but we can design spaces to help us understand our relationship to all types of environmental factors, including those that we are incapable of seeing but that are capable of seeing through us.

Keywords: easement, digital, well-being

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Whiteout Snow as New Energy and Urban Driving Force Ivy Dou, Jingyun Li, Zhaodi Wang Danielle Choi Whiteout challenges the current snow dumping activities,which consumes tons of energy and human resources, and reorients Quincy around snow. The project shifts the perspective of snow from waste to resource, while the public realm is re-envisioned as a stage for the choreography of snow manipulation. It propagates new snow energy framework and a more sustainable metabolic loop, improves the community sensibility, and eventually reshapes the urban configuration.

Snow, as a sensitive factor of urban mobility, causes large energy consumption and resource input in winter. Therefore the project starts with the MBTA, Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, due to its large energy consumption, abundant land resources and strong urban connectivity, and creates a new framework for snow utilization.

Carefully studied the lifecycle of snow, water and energy, the project innovates a series manipulation strategies. The snow is transformed from waste to the new source of electricity, cooling, and soft water.

To propagate citywide, based on the existing situation and involved agencies, the snow manipulation process could be implemented into three phases.

1. MBTA-owned land + TOD 2. DCR-owned land + DOT+ community 3. School + Hospital + community By constructing snow facilities and regulating new snow district, a more sustainable energy structure is propagated and community sensibility is improved. The public realm is re-envisioned as a stage for the choreography of snow manipulation, which simultaneously generates the new ownership, stewardship and urban configuration.

Keywords: snow, cryogenic energy, urban configuration

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Localizing Infrastructures Pavement Removal and Social Activation in North Quincy Ariel Bi, Simón Escabi, Jonathon Koewler Jill Desimini In the coming decades, the city of Quincy must imbue its core systems with new values of economy, transit, and public space.

We believe that the city’s current emphasis on vehicular transit is a hindrance to creating interactions between the existing vital communities—including active secondgeneration Asian immigrant populations—and the new economic opportunities the city is pursuing, especially in the biotech sector. With its location along major highway and transit routes, North Quincy has emerged as a destination for those looking to relocate and save on rents. However, the current trends foster a car-driven urbanism that produces both a sea of pavement and a disregard for local cultures and connections.

Our project reorients Quincy’s future by considering how its infrastructures can be localized and adapted to transform the public realm in a holistic system. The broken assemblages of stormwater management and transit infrastructure are recombined to reclaim space from the derelict parking lots and roadways. Existing local businesses and community organizations are engaged to inhabit spaces on multiple timescales. Instead of mobility, hydrology and economy being thought of as distinct systems, they will operate together within the everyday social spaces.

Considering the qualities of the near-future city, this project engrains attenuation into the transit, capital, and people in the city. The current emphasis on speed limits relationships and the exchange of cultures and capital. This proposal considers how moments of transfer and reduction can benefit the natural and social aspects of a city.

This transformation is envisioned as a succession plan for the systems of Quincy, tested on multiple scales. Our sites address residential streets, commercial lots along the main thoroughfare, and larger supermarkets and office parks. As the pavement is broken up across the city for new stormwater control, new transit will be invested in. As new transit takes root, economic and recreational opportunities aggregate. As economies settle, transit systems mutate and social opportunities respond. The gradual accumulation of strategies and systems-integration creates a new grain in the fabric of the city with palpable benefits for the daily experiences of city residents. Incremental maneuvers progressively transfer more land from parking and roadway to civic space, affordable commerce, and community program.

Keywords: transit, succession, inter-cultural urbanism

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The Living Ground The Near Future City Sub-Surface Camila Barbosa Huber, Alykhan Neky Danielle Choi Our vision of the near future city is of one that sits on a living ground, we propose a re-imagination of foundations in which they co-exist with natural forces such as plant roots and water.

Currently, foundations in general (of buildings, roads, utilities, among others) are the imperative elements of the sub-surface of a city as they dictate the presence and arrangement of other elements and restrain the presence of living organisms.

Since the city of Quincy faces the threat of rising sea-levels and storm surge inundation, large contingents of residents will face the need to abandon their current residence and retreat. Some dry tracts of land will inevitably become secluded due to infrastructure impairment. Such scenario provided us with the framework to repurpose the foundations of the vacated city as well as the zone identified to accommodate displaced residents and consequently a higher density.

Foundations of the recently uninhabited regions acquire multiple functions such as nurseries, erosion barriers, cultural spaces, among others. But most importantly, they become an organizing principle for a productive silviculture landscape that fosters the retreat and densification cycle that occurs along 90 years according to rising sea-levels.

Meanwhile, foundations of the developed region adapt, or new elements are designed to accommodate a dense city fabric that is, through a range of heights, lifted from the ground and porous, coexisting with dynamic elements in a living ground.

Keywords: foundations, living organisms, lumber, retreat

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Under New Management Cultural Landscape Conservation as Climate Adaptation Hannah Chako, Sydney Conaway, Cecilia Huber Jill Desimini The current preservation methods of our coastal cultural landscapes ignore their imminent inundation. The practice of rebuilding historically significant sites to their past condition nearly ensures obsolescence. In order to continue the life of these sites, we must imagine new conservation practices that preserve the things we value in these landscapes: public access and enjoyment.

For us, Quincy Shore Drive represents how this current paradigm of cultural landscape conservation is directly opposed to strategies for climate adaptation. The ocean parkway was designed by Charles Eliot in 1893 and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2003. Its maintenance regime hybridizes its former condition with contemporary demands on urban infrastructure.

This proposal responds to the recurrent investment in the preservation of Quincy Shore Drive as a cultural landscape. The practice of restoring the drive to its “period of historic significance” contradicts its seminal values of public access and enjoyment of the coast.

Sea level rise will render this distinctive feature of coastal Quincy obsolete.

In response, this project imagines coastal life in the near future through a conservationdriven urban design strategy. Our redesign of Quincy Shore Drive accommodates both sea level rise and continued public access to this historic site in Boston’s greater reservation system.

New parkway designations, shared ownership of private property, conservation easements, and an expanded trail system organize coastal retreat at a local level.

These strategies define partnerships between the Department of Conservation and Recreation, the City of Quincy, and private landowners. Our project allows residents to choose to remain living where they desire through new property ownership structures, building on the City of Quincy’s existing proposal for buy-outs in repetitive loss zones.

Through combinations of land use strategies, conservation management, and settlement, our project introduces new coastal living typologies to Quincy. Characterized by an expanded reservation and urban growth, our proposal offers an optimistic vision for the future of life at the beach in the coming decades.

Keywords: conservation, cultural landscape, maintentance and management

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Yard Work

Chelsea Kilburn, Andy Lee, Kari Roynesdal Danielle Choi In the near future Quincy, we are celebrating the desire to live and remain in place while creating new ways of living with and managing water over time. Two-time scales involving governmental agencies as well as local action allow the landscape architect to imagine new definitions of retreat via a reconstruction of water management practices. Current zoning practices, such as restrictions on use and form, already challenge dominant conceptions of private property as a domain of exclusive use. With the contingencies of sea level rise, we strongly advocate that the concept of private property as an individual expression of the right to own and the right to use your property must radically alter and de-couple.

Through a transitional period of retreat and re-densification, we preserve the right to remain in place under rising sea-levels while re-orienting the suburban community towards collective water management. In the first time scale, through changes in grading and introductions of wetness in private yards, new uses of public and private property emerge and merge, blurring the harsh lines that mark the suburban landscape with new community uses.

The later time scales allow residents to retreat within their community, densifying under localized managed aerial watersheds which direct and hold water while providing a backbone for infrastructure to consolidate and grow above ground. With these time scales of local and federal land management practices, the distinction between land ownership and land use bifurcates. Over time, this bifurcation allows the assemblage to re-configure both the coastline and the structure of the block, which must consolidate around key infrastructures in Quincy.

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