No Harvard plan will pass without measures taken for community housing, relieving worries about Harvard driving out the old neighbors with a newly gentrified strip, and Mellone says the community is at work on housing plans with rent controls tied to cost of living increases.

“We want to keep it affordable so that our sons and daughters can live here,” he says.

The Planning Process

Within Harvard, a group called the Physical Planning Committee fits the many proposed Allston uses into a broad, conceptual scheme for the land.

Comprised of senior administrators and faculty from across the University, the group was created in 1997 and reports to the central administration, the President and Provost.

The committee’s speculations must stay vague until President Summers takes office this fall.

“With a new president coming in who will take control of this process, and with no clear direction from the academic side, we really can’t say what the land will look like,” Director of Harvard Planning and Real Estate (HPRE) Kathy Spiegelman says.

But that hasn’t stopped them from thinking about it, and the Committee has looked at everything from a Harvard Square on Allston to avant-garde architecture.

They hired Rem Koolhaas, a renowned Professor at the design school in vogue for his giant displays of odd geometry, for a six-month conceptual study of the land, which concluded last May but proved too experimental.

“We hired him to do something very outlandish, not really considering the practical needs or the budget. It was a very smart, very creative guy imagining what we could do with this community,” Spiegelman says.

Koolhaas’s plans have sparked some creative thinking for the new land.

“Instead of recreating what we have in Cambridge, we may come up with a whole new concept,” Spiegelman says. “We’re not just talking about 50 foot buildings around grassy quadrangles.”