The future of the University increasingly hinges upon its land across the river in Allston

Another year has passed and Harvard’s campus of the future remains criss-crossed by railroad tracks and dotted with gas stations, auto body shops and an abandoned truck yard.

More than 100 acres of Harvard’s undeveloped land in Allston were left relatively untouched.

But while the status quo prevailed on the ground, at the highest levels of University administration, planning for Allston took on a new urgency.

It began with a talking campaign and with it, presidential prioritization. University President Lawrence H. Summers said early in the year that a campus in Allston will be one of his lasting legacies.

Talk was followed by a new planning process centered around faculty committees and focused on three possible models for Allston.

And this summer, data collection will begin in earnest to prepare for preliminary recommendations, due next winter, on the future of Harvard’s land in Allston.

Talking It Up

From nearly the first day of his administration, Summers approached Allston with his strongest weapon—the bully pulpit.

Allston would be high on his agenda, Summers said, and a new campus will represent one of his biggest legacies.

“If we make the right choices, if we take full advantage of a physical opportunity across the river in Allston—an opportunity to create a campus that is several times as large as this whole yard—we will have earned the gratitude of future generations,” Summers said in his Tercentenary Theatre installation speech.

Throughout the year, Summers elaborated on what those choices meant.

In his first meetings with Law School administrators and faculty, Summers made it clear that the school would have to consider a move to Allston, despite a prior faculty vote to the contrary.

Summers stressed in meetings with deans, faculty and planners across the University that the planning was starting from square one, and that no options for Allston could be definitively ruled out.

And he often said—again with the Law School in mind—that any future building in Cambridge will have to take into account all possible uses of Allston.

“What I have made clear to each of the schools is that this is so salient and large an opportunity that, while we have not made any decision about how [the land] will be used, all major planning decisions from this point forward will have to contemplate how they will work out under different scenarios for Allston,” Summers said last summer.