It's a shift of just a few hundred feet, less than half a city block, but few things Harvard administrators could have done would have please Harvard's closest neighbors more.

When Harvard administrators publicly unveiled a new plan in late October that moved the proposed site of the Knafel Center for Government and International Studies' site from the garden behind the Graduate School of Design's Gund Hall to a site encompassing the current Coolidge Hall and the University Information Services building, the announcement put to rest, for the most part, community opposition to the project.

The positive community response came as an endorsement of the University's extensive outreach efforts on the project, efforts that have worked to smooth what was bound to be a rocky path towards Knafel. Just a few months ago, when tentative plans for the first location were revealed, neighborhood approval seemed almost unforeseeable.

But Harvard's gamble--the decision to show their hand long before they knew precisely which cards they held--seems to be paying off in the long run. It's a lesson that seems to be sticking in administrators' minds as they look toward future development.

With numerous battles to be fought over renovations of the Fogg and the Sackler museums, the development of its Allston land and the construction of new laboratory buildings, Harvard has learned from Knafel to limit its public relations battle losses in the early skirmishes.

The Road to Knafel

In November 1996 University officials announced the $15 million dollar gift of New York venture capitalist Sidney R. Knafel '52 to Harvard's $2.1 billion dollar capital campaign. Knafel, who chairs the visiting committee to the Center for International Affairs, earmarked the money for the construction of a center for government and international studies, a project that would relocate the government, economics and other social science departments to a unified campus location.

When Harvard decided to focus their location search on the Swedenborgian block, a largely residential area in the vicinity of the Design School, administrators quickly recognized that the grand scale of the project would likely conflict with the desires of the Cambridge community to maintain the residential flavor of the neighborhood.

"All off us recognized from the outset that because this project is near a neighborhood edge that there would certainly be interests and concerns voiced by the neighbors," says Mary H. Power, Harvard's director of community relations for Cambridge. "With that in mind we decided that it was necessary to engage the neighborhood directly in the planning."

In February 1997 Harvard held its first large public meeting on the project--a surprising move given its history of keeping plans close to the vest until much further along in the development process, and the limited specifics available at that time. They had no architect, no design drawing and no firm site chosen, but Harvard officials proceeded anyway.

The community reaction to the notion of constructing a six-story building in the garden behind Gund Hall, despite the fact that those first plans were never formalized, quickly drew strong opposition from residents. Another hindrance was the fact that residents read duplicity into administrators' indefinite plans.

The University "engaged comment earlier, at the formative level of planning, [but] people read [each idea] as though it was already done," says Kathy A. Spiegelman, associate vice president of planning and real estate.

For her part, Power, who has headed up Harvard's community outreach on the Knafel project, now recognizes the difficulty associated with going to the community without definite information.

"Part of the frustration is that by going out early, before designs had been developed, there were no specific plans that we could speak to, but we wanted to speak to our programmatic interests and a range of design possibilities," says Power.

One result was that thoughts on plans become "based on rumor." Power acknowledges that, "It's a trade-off that I think I need to work on."

Power is the first to admit that at this point in the process the University has as many questions unanswered as answered about the specifics of the project.