GSD Class Considers Harvard’s Future

Thirteen young urban planners filed into a conference room in Gund Hall.

Each of them had spent months examining the future of Harvard campuses—both in Cambridge and across the Charles River—and the time had come for them to present their tentative findings.

Armed with colorful posters and PowerPoint presentations, they came ready to explain their plans.

An attentive audience, representing many of the high-powered groups that will decide Allston’s future, sat in anticipation, ready to listen to the presentations and critique the plans. Representatives attended from Harvard Planning and Real Estate (HPRE), the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) and the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA), which will ultimately oversee Harvard development in Allston.

And the plans were radical.

As a presentation flashed up on a screen, one planner unveiled her ambitious vision. Her proposal would create a new subway line to connect Harvard’s campuses in Cambridge and Allston to other major universities in the area.

Later, another planner pointed to the poster showing what it might look like if Harvard moved all its Cambridge-based graduate schools across the river. Her plan would also create a “Graduate House System” for students and their families, much like the College’s arrangement.

So went the mid-term presentations of thirteen students at the Graduate School of Design (GSD) last Tuesday.

The student are enrolled in an urban planning class that is specifically focused on the much-discussed future of Harvard’s Cambridge campus and the possibilities for the University’s extensive property holdings in Watertown and Allston.

Students have spent the semester so far comparing how other colleges have expanded and how these institutions get along with their home towns. Based on their research, the students have also tackled many of the problems facing a growing Harvard, ranging from the University’s relationships with its host cities to the transportation needs new buildings will create.

During the presentations, the Harvard and community planners who comprised the audience discussed each plan in turn, identifying pros and cons and pointing out what dilemmas each plan left unresolved.

Alex Krieger, one of the studio course’s instructors and chair of the GSD’s department of urban planning and design, said students are using the course to examine a wide variety of issues related to Harvard’s expansion.

“Some are questioning Harvard’s need to grow as much as it does,” Krieger said. “Some are trying to figure out how muchHarvard needs to grow.”

The proposal to develop a new subway line to connect Boston-area campuses came from GSD student Nora R. Libertun. Under her plan, a new T line would link Harvard’s campus to Boston University and other local college campuses in an “urban ring.” Currently, she said, there is “no connection” between schools in Boston and Cambridge.

For years planners in Boston have talked about creating an “urban ring”—a subway line that would circle the city and connect several T lines that currently spread from the city center. The area’s need for this new line, Krieger said, coincides with Harvard’s need for new connections.

“Harvard’s plan properly considered might shorten the time we have to wait for urban ring,” he said.

But, when it came time for the audience to weigh in, Associate Professor of Urban Design Richard A. Marshall challenged the idea that a new T line would be an unconditional good.

“You are making an assumption that connection is always a good thing,” he said.

Another student presentation involved creating a “science hub” in Allston, which is one of the scenarios for development across the river that high-level University planners say they are considering.

Here, too, Marshall raised qualms about what Harvard expansion would mean for the community where the University is moving in.

“You’re very quiet on the issue of gentrification,” he said. “It’s a phenomenon that’s going to happen.”

To Marshall issues of connecting communities and worrying about what happens to them as big institutions take over are not new. In 1999 he led a GSD studio class that considered options for Harvard’s Allston property, and he said the timing of his studio—just two years after Harvard disclosed it had spent the last decade buying 100 acres of land in Allston—meant that politics shared the stage with planning.

“Tensions were very raw between the BRA, Harvard, and the community,” Marshall said.

This year, with relations largely mended between Harvard and Allston community leaders, many presentations took a long view on planning issues without the added pressure of turmoil between the University and its prospective hosts.

In her presentation GSD student Connie Chung focused on long-term housing needs. She proposed that all of Harvard’s 30 acres in Watertown, as well as much of its undeveloped Allston property, should be devoted to creating no fewer than 4,700 housing units for faculty, students and even some residents.

Chung also put one of the most oft-mentioned candidates for a cross-river move—Harvard Law School—on Allston land and managed to make it more than fit.

“I took the Law School and I doubled that in size so you can see there’s more than enough room,” she said.

For now the plans offered last Tuesday in Gund Hall remain only the speculations of their creators. Although Harvard administrators have said a new campus could be underway within a decade, for now plans for Allston remain undecided—a reality that course leader Krieger readily acknowledged.

“It’s tough thinking about Harvard a generation from now and all its campuses,” he said.

—Staff writer Lauren R. Dorgan can be reached at dorgan@fas.harvard.edu.