Harvard Design Magazine no.53: Reuse and repair

Making urban places is a never-ending process, as needs, desires, beliefs, and populations are always shifting. The building sector currently produces 31 percent of annual global carbon emissions and accounts for one of the largest components of municipal waste in many countries. As the industry tries to curtail its outsized contribution to the climate crisis and its excessive resource use, how can architects simultaneously ensure our cities stay alive and responsive to their inhabitants? How can we find greater equality and pleasure in living together as communities while also living more lightly on the earth?

This issue of Harvard Design Magazine seeks to develop and expand this increasingly vital movement, engaging reuse across multiple scales—from individual buildings to downtown streets and the regulatory frameworks that organize our cities. Highlighting creative and interdisciplinary thinking, the issue promotes the act of bringing new life to what already exists as a powerful brief for designers, their clients, and the communities they serve. As resistance to viewing the reuse and repair of buildings as a legitimate form of design wanes, the appeal at the heart of Sandburg’s poem—“let us find a city”—is hopefully capturing the attention of future generations. This issue asks: If we free ourselves from the inherited limits on design practice, what new kinds of architecture, cities, and ways of being might we create?

Harvard Design Magazine, 2025

29.5 X 22.5 cm, 248 pages