Urban Planning and Design at Harvard

What do urban planning students do at GSD outside of their coursework? First-year MUP Micah Weese explored the morphology of neighborhoods in six cities for an exhibition at the Quotes Gallery at GSD. His project analyzes building orientation to provide glimpses into the particular contexts from which these neighborhoods emerge, including colonial planning, modernist planning, sprawl, informality, and segregation, and suburbanization.

How does urban planning impact the daily lives of aging populations? What types of technology can support aging in place?

In last week's Harvard Gazette, Ruth and Frank Stanton Professor of Urban Planning Ann Forsyth spoke about the opportunities and challenges for older adults seeking to age in place.

Read more here:

Aging independently, by design — Harvard Gazette Most older adults say they want to spend their golden years in their own homes. The reality is more complicated, says urban planning expert.

In his project-based class “Refugees in the Rust Belt”, Prof. Dan D’Oca turns design and planning’s attention to long-term processes of refugee resettlement. Centered on Upstate New York’s Erie Canal corridor, the class focuses on post-industrial cities facing population decline and aging infrastructure that have become some of the most welcoming places in the country.

A weekend field trip to Buffalo, Utica, and Albany to meet with refugee residents, resettlement agencies and other service providers, academics, and planners allowed students to see firsthand how physical conditions and policy frameworks shape resettlement outcomes.

Core II Studio kicked off the semester with a chilly site visit to led by Chief of Planning and Community Development Tom Skwierawski. The studio aims to develop a waterbody framework plan for Revere, identifying ways to activate Revere Beach, Belle Isle Marsh and Rumney Marsh, and Chelsea Creek to transform them into connected systems of public life, ecological resilience, and civic identity.

The studio’s first task? Analyzing the ecological, economic, regulatory, and human relationships with these waterbodies through research and stakeholder engagement.

How can one define home today?

That question sits at the core of last fall’s Option Studio “Home. House. Housing.”, led by Prof. Toni Griffin. Based in the Washington Park neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, the studio challenges conventional ideas of housing through lenses of place, personhood, and adaptation, reimagining how we live, work, create, and build community in American cities.

Situated in areas with extraordinary cultural legacies alongside long histories of disinvestment and displacement, the studio engages housing as a social, cultural, and spatial project. Last October, a visit to the Windy City allowed students to engage directly with architects, artists, and residents, grounding design speculation in lived experience and translating those insights into their final proposals. Pictured here, site visits to and introduced new models of land stewardship and co-creation in South Side neighborhoods.

Second-year MUP Julia Duro and Associate Professor of Urban Planning Carole Voulgaris, along with DDes Jae Hyun Kim and DDes Dawson Oh, published “Constraints or Freedom? Relationships between Destination Accessibility and Activity Spaces” in Transport Findings in December.

This paper revealed people living in Granada, Spain in well-connected areas travel shorter distances on weekdays because of their proximity to desirable locations, not because they are time-constrained. On weekends, low-income and high-income households have smaller activity spaces than middle-income households, suggesting middle-income groups have the resources for leisure travel but fewer time constraints than high-income households.

This Fall semester some students stayed closer to home for their studio projects. The option studio “Who Owns the Grid? Spatializing Our Collective Clean Energy Futures” asked urban planning, urban design, landscape architecture, and architecture students to rethink Newmarket Square, the industrial heart of Boston, as a lab for clean energy innovation.

Asking questions about clean energy technologies like solar, geothermal, waste-heat recovery, and battery storage, the studio conducted an early site visit to witness Newmarket’s current struggles with the electric grid, heat and flooding hazards, as well as conflicts over land use, community health, housing, and industry.

Co-ran by Siqi Zhu from and Caroline Filice Smith from , this studio asked students to engage with the technical, spatial, and political dimensions of energy infrastructure across the parcel, neighborhood, or system scale.

The second project in Core I Studio focuses on developing a proposal to improve health in Roxbury. First-year MUPs Kendal Eastwood, Nisha Singh, and Ricardo Schulz suggest a collaboration between Roxbury Community College’s Building Sciences Program and the Boston Housing Authority to resolve common household hazards that trigger asthma and other breathing problems.

We’re approaching final studio reviews at and looking back at the Core I Studio visit to Boston City Hall in October. Conversations with on public planning and local government informed first-year students’ next projects on health. And no visit to Boston City Hall is complete without a peek at the model room!

Photo credit: Diego Degenhart (MUP ‘27)

What does transit access in Roxbury look like? In Core I Studio, first-year MUPs Jingze Wang, Miles Chandler, Micah Weese, Neha Singh, and Yanjia Jin dove deep into the history of public transit in this neighborhood, recent challenges and successes, and proposals to improve Roxbury residents’ mobility.