Unlike Allston Landing, convenient to the Yard and HBS, there is a second large, contiguous patch of property—a busy shopping center with a Star Market, a K-Mart, and a Petco—deeper in Allston.

Harvard is likely to keep that property in commercial retail use in the near term, according to McCluskey.

The University has put significant resources into improving the popular shopping center.

“We just made improvements on the whole shopping area and made it a much more attractive and usable space,” McCluskey says.

Planning

Since June of last year, Boston-based planners Goody, Clancy and Associates—a firm picked by the city and paid for by Harvard—have been working with the community to put together a “Community Master Plan,” that will set guidelines for zoning that will determine the scale of Harvard’s Allston buildings.

The Community Master Planning is expected to finish between June and September, according to Jansi Chandler, BRA project manager for North Allston.

Under normal circumstances, Harvard would renew its Institutional Master Plan—an overview of planned construction for the next five years—on July 1, but certainly Harvard’s internal planning and likely the CMP won’t be done by then.

“They don’t have to renew their master plan unless there are buildings they want to build in the next five or so years,” said B. Owen Donnelly, who oversees the Master Plans of all institutions in Boston.

Harvard will likely get an extension for filing a new IMP so they can move further along in their internal planning before and finish the CMP before committing to a five-year vision, according to Ray Mellone, chair of the North Allston Community Task Force that participates in the CMP.

Harvard can move administrative uses into existing office building—like those along Soldier’s Field—without having the zoning changed.

“If there were space in one of these buildings that we needed to use on a short-term basis, that wouldn’t necessarily require us to declare it right away as institutional use,” McCluskey said.

Meanwhile, inside Harvard, two internal planning groups are considering scenarios for the Allston land—a University-wide physical planning committee with faculty representatives from the different school and a committee at Harvard Law School considering its potential move to Allston.

So far the Physical Planning Committee has focused on three options for the Allston land.

At first, discussion centered on building graduate student dorms and several museums. Later, the discussion shifted to a professional campus with several graduate schools. Recently, a third option emerged, to create a state-of-the-art science campus with possible commercial tie-ins.

Regardless of which plan the university adopts, Allston development will be top priority for President Summers’ adminstration.

“Larry Summers absolutely sees this plan for a new campus in Allston as a keystone of his presidency,” Spiegelman says.

—Staff writer Lauren R. Dorgan can be reached at dorgan@fas.harvard.edu.