Real Estate Development and Urban Planning Issues Are the Focus of a New Group of Seminars from Harvard Design School

Harvard Design School Seminars to Tackle Issues in Real Estate Development and Urban Planning

(PRWEB) June 24, 2005 -- Harvard Design Schools summer roster of executive education seminars features a new group of programs that focus on housing, mixed-use development, strategic facilities planning, and other topics in real estate and urban planning.

Designed specifically for real estate developers, urban planners, architects, and leaders of community development corporations and social service agencies, these seminars explore timely issues and trends affecting their industries.

The seminars offered include:
- Strategic Facility Planning: Aligning Real Estate and Facility Assets with Business Goals, July 11-12
- Positioning Small Capital Projects for Success, July 13
- Developing Workforce Housing, July 14-15
- Affordable Housing: An Introduction to the Development Process, July 25-26
- Owning the Future: Urban Housing and Mixed-Use Development, July 25-26
- Urban Retail Planning Principles for American Towns, Cities, and Commercial Centers, July 28-29

Strategic Facility Planning: Aligning Real Estate and Facility Assets with Business Goals. As companies and institutions increasingly face the challenge of aligning their real estate and facility assets with their business goals, Strategic Facilities Planning, or SFP, has grown as an area of expertise and as a discipline that provides sophisticated tools to support complex decisions. A strategic facilities plan provides a means of visualizing the future that allows an organization to test a future condition that does not yet exist. This seminar offers insight into SFP and examines how strategic facility planning can be used to assess long-term facility and real estate requirements and to communicate strategic opportunities to senior management.

Positioning Small Capital Projects for Success
From this one-day seminar, business executives, project managers, and design and construction professionals will gain an overarching perspective on the project development process. Topics include project lifecycle, critical first steps, team management, and integrating the project into ongoing operations. Interactive exercises on common challenges, decision making, organizational readiness/risk assessment, and team building will provide practical applications of concepts covered and will enable participants to gain confidence in positioning their projects for success.

Developing Workforce Housing
Led by Nicolas P. Retsinas, Director of Harvard Universitys Joint Center for Housing Studies, and created in response to the growing awareness of the need for affordable workforce housing, this new seminar examines how that need is shaping the priorities of communities, employers, policymakers, and planners around the nation. Designed to challenge assumptions and broaden perspectives, Developing Workforce Housing will consist of a blend of modules that address the market for workforce housing; state and local regulations intended to channel or manage growth; the development of workforce housing in both inner-ring suburbs and urban contexts that require adaptive reuse or infill; and the navigation of regulatory complexity.

Affordable Housing: An Introduction to the Development Process
This two-day seminar offers an introduction to the process of developing housing that serves low- and moderate-income households, beginning with an overview of why a significant portion of the population cannot afford decent housing. The seminar covers the critical components of the affordable housing development process: market, sites, capital/finance, subsidies, the professional team, and approvals/permits. It concludes with a review of a timeline that considers each of these important development process elements and places them in sequential relationship.

Owning the Future: Urban Housing and Mixed-Use Development
This seminar introduces and explores the contemporary architectural, ecological, and civic issues contained within and surrounding the trend toward combining, in new and creative ways, housing and commercial development to create mixed-use urban and suburban neighborhoods. It also explores the primary issues of housing/commercial mixed-use developments as they relate to senior and special needs housing, urban renewal, and rapid transit and why and how urban decay is affecting older suburban neighborhoods.

Urban Retail Planning Principles for American Towns, Cities, and Commercial Centers. Now established as one of the most successful development models since World War II, mixed-use (lifestyle) town center development is still risky and difficult to implement. This two-day seminar focuses on the actual nuts and bolts of how to program, plan, and develop both urban and suburban town centers, including land, parking, building, site planning, zoning, national retailer demands, and developer requirements.

All of Harvard Design Schools Executive Education Seminars are registered with the AIA (American Institute of Architects) Continuing Education System and earn AIA/CES units. Complete seminar and registration information can be found at www.gsd.harvard.edu/execed

About the Office of Executive Education at Harvard Design School
The Office of Executive Education at Harvard Design School is the foremost provider of Executive Education programs for architects, planners, landscape architects, and real estate and building industry professionals. Executive Education offers an extensive menu of open enrollment seminars that explore timely design issues and trends; admissions programs that cover topics in real estate; and customized programs that are tailored to an organizations or firms specific needs. Drawing upon the unparalleled resources of Harvard University, Executive Education programs are led by renowned faculty from the Design School, the Business School, the Law School, and the Kennedy School of Government, as well as eminent practitioners and scholars from across the country and around the world. For more information, visit www.gsd.harvard.edu/execed

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