Cultivating Shade: Policy, Planning, Design, and Activism for Geneva's Urban Forest is a research seminar report from the Spring 2025 semester at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, taught by Eric Kramer.
The Cultivating Shade research seminar engaged the subject of the urban forest master plan as a tool for transformative change in Geneva, Switzerland—change that is ecological as well as cultural. Taught in the department of landscape architecture, it sought to leverage the increasing availability of spatially and temporally specific data to envision site specific, culturally grounded, and spatially coherent design solutions that protect, enhance, and enlarge the urban forest. We brought design thinking to systems-scale challenges, and using the tools designers know best, the case study, scenario planning, and the prototype, to ground our methodology.
