Future Histories Lab Courses

Undergraduate Courses

Hidden in Plain Sight: Public History in Public Space

• Fulfills the elective requirement for the Certificate in Urban Humanities

Hidden in Plain Sight will explore the ways history can be illuminated or erased through urban design, museums and monuments, archives, historic preservation, heritage tourism, media, oral history, and cultural resource management. This lecture course provides foundational knowledge about public history and establishes a context for the humanities studios in the Future Histories Lab program and the Certificate in Urban Humanities. In this course you will explore some of the theoretical and methodological challenges surrounding the presentation and preservation of public spaces and histories in the U.S. context. Highlighting landscapes that have been shaped by issues such as economic inequality, processes of migration, mass incarceration, racism, and larger conditions of societal and planetary change, we will analyze what is hidden, forgotten, missing, or in need of representation. Case studies will consider different scales of representation in national, regional/state, and local projects. Throughout the semester, you will learn to connect historical projects and scholarship to wider audiences, while considering the expansion of history’s stakeholders.

Archiving as Social Justice Practice

• Fulfills the studio requirement for the Certificate in Urban Humanities
• Summer Bridge only (you must be a participant in the Summer Bridge program for incoming students; for info contact sbridge@berkeley.edu)

In this course you will explore how archival practices support social justice scholarship. Archives run the gamut from small personal collections to major institutions. You will study several special collections built by and for activists, review their missions and processes, and learn about the role that archival practice plays in the building of knowledge. You will work with a community organization to digitize and catalog their collection of posters and other documents, to research the history behind them, and make this archive available online to the public. As case studies you may investigate the Center for the Study of Political Graphics (Los Angeles), the Interference Archive (Brooklyn), the Freedom Archives (San Francisco), and Docs Populi / Documents for the Public (Berkeley).

Radical History of SF Chinatown: Designing a Digital Tour

• Fulfills the Humanities Studio Requirement for the Certificate in Urban Humanities.
• Enrollment by approval of instructor. Application deadline Nov. 6. Instructor will review all applications and students will be admitted on a rolling basis. Questions? Email Prof. Siu at lok.siu@berkeley.edu Apply here.

This project-based course explores San Francisco’s Chinatown as the site of Asian American civil rights activism with the goal of developing a conceptual blueprint for an interactive online tour of SF Chinatown. Students will read historical and ethnographic accounts, conduct interviews with community leaders, visit community organizations, go on a walking tour, map and visually document culturally and politically significant sites in Chinatown. Upon completing this research, students will conceptualize and create an interactive digital tour of SF Chinatown that can be expanded and deepen over time. Learn more here.

See more: https://sfchinatown.github.io/#/main-themes

Landscapes of Migration, Incarceration, and Resistance

In this course, you’ll hear artists, activists and scholars explore themes of exclusion, belonging, and resistance across geographies and genres including film, dance, theater, literature, visual arts, and music. The speaker series is part of the multi-genre project “A Year on Angel Island,” and we’ll use the former immigration station at this meaningful spot in San Francisco Bay as a jumping-off point for wide-ranging conversations. 

Through lectures by leading scholars, artists, and public figures, students are introduced to vocabularies, forms, and histories from the many arts, design, humanities, and media disciplines represented at UC Berkeley. Students engage with the lecture series through weekly response papers and a final reflection paper. Learn more here.

Unlocatable: Seeking Hong Kong and its Arts

• Fulfills the Humanities Studio Requirement for the Certificate in Urban Humanities.

A city of great change and tiny spaces for them, Hong Kong abounds in contradictions and movement. Marked by a history of migration, refuge, exile, and capital flows, its preferred cultural forms are fleeting ones, born of dislocation and relocation. What is the relationship between an art form and the place in which it was produced? How do we communicate the particularities of a location while doing justice to the universality of an artwork’s expression? This course immerses students in the history of the arts in Hong Kong, the Pearl River Delta region, and its diasporas. Students will research art in many media, from comedy to graphic design, from Kung Fu to video art. Collaborating with the Asian Art Museum, students will produce digital materials for public engagement. The course will culminate in an online exhibition of students’ work, an effort to “locate” and “see” Hong Kong and its arts. Learn more here.

Tres Hornos: Earthen Ovens and Foodways of the Southwest

This course centers on the design, construction, sustainable use, and experimental variables in archaeological feature visibility of a broadly used food technology, earthen ovens. Known as the horno in the US Southwest, this colonial introduction is the focus of our seminar, experimenting with construction techniques and using them to cook a variety of indigenous and introduced foods. Collaboratively-built hornos will be touchstones for exploring how cultural and historical tradition intersects with contemporary practice via 3D clay fabrication techniques and through the creative lens of installation, land art, and social practice. An attached small-scale garden project will provide a physical connection to ethnobotanical histories. Undergraduate and graduate students from across the university will work together to explore how the friction between empire and indigeneity can create both anxious and productive outcomes. Seminar participants will also participate in hands-on experiences building and cooking and examination of archaeological artifacts, among other learning modalities, to think about how colonial food practices shape(ed) contemporary ways of making, cooking, growing, and community building.

Remembering Eugenics at Berkeley and in
California

• Fulfills the studio requirement for the Certificate in Urban Humanities

This Humanities Studio and Mentored Research Lab will confront the histories and legacies of eugenics close to home, at UC Berkeley, in the town of Berkeley, and in California. Our university’s a good location for this work, since “higher education” has been a key site for the development of the structures through which eugenics is conducted: IQ and achievement testing, disciplinary policies, segregation, and ideas about who’s fit to, and who deserves to be, in a place like this. Facing Berkeley’s deep eugenic past is one way to start doing reparations for our university’s part in how science was used and misused in the name of “race betterment.” Understanding eugenics means inevitably grappling intersectionally with histories of race, nation, disability, gender, class, and sexuality, in the twentieth century and beyond. Student work, across a wide range of disciplines, will explore, and publicly present, the legacy of eugenics in California: what it means here, now. The topic’s urgent. We are seeing an alarming resurgence of the rhetoric and practice of a century ago.

The course will foreground the interdisciplinary network of academics and community activists working on the continuing legacy of eugenics in California. Part of a transnational project, “From Small Beginnings”, the group aims to recover and foreground the voices and experiences of thousands of Californians subjected to eugenic ideologies, policies, and practices. Our work will connect with that project, focusing on nearby histories of eugenics. At the same time, we’ll place our explorations of the politics and ethics of commemoration in a broader, international context. Students will help organize UCB’s hosting of the University of London’s From Small Beginnings exhibit, and we’ll design local, Berkeley and California-based additions to that exhibit.  Individual and group research projects will use methods that may include public art installations, performance, audio storytelling, video, augmented reality, mapping, photography, campaigns for naming and renaming, and designs for memorials or anti-memorials.

Place-Based Storytelling Techniques and Technologies

This colloquium explored techniques of place-based storytelling through a series of guest speakers who are producers of place-based storytelling projects in the Bay area. What traditional and emerging technologies do they employ to create the experiences? What lessons can we learn from their efforts to point out local histories embedded in the landscape? Learn more here.

Race, Redevelopment and Gentrification: Oakland’s Hoover Durant Library

• Fulfills the studio requirement for the Certificate in Urban Humanities
• Watch info session recording here.

For several decades, West Oakland residents have been working to establish the Hoover-Durant Library in their neighborhood as a center for community and culture.  In this course, students worked collaboratively with community members to conduct research and created products such as plans and oral histories that advance their cause. Students engaged intellectually and personally with issues of race and privilege and examine systemically entrenched inequities through the story of one neighborhood. Through time spent in the neighborhood and with its activists, students learned about local needs and strengths and collaborate with residents in ways that benefit their project. The course work is framed by the work of scholars of color who study the intersection of race, architecture and urbanism. Students learned to use and organize archives, research potential sites for the library, and created events such as a popup library or zine workshop.

Public Art and Social Justice: Mapping Mural Art and Narratives

• Fulfills the studio requirement for the Certificate in Urban Humanities.
• Info session recording here.

This studio course focuses on an important part of social movements: public cultural production. The recent movements for Black lives, struggles against gentrification and police violence has led to a growth of public art/muralism in urban locations other than public/business walls. This humanities studio documented and mapped murals and other forms of public art produced in Oakland, Berkeley, and Richmond California. Students conducted interviews and ethnographic fieldwork with art crews, muralists, and artists who are producing public art across the Bay Area. In collaboration with artist, students produced public web galleries that used Augmented Reality technology to embed sound bites of interviews or information on the murals.  Additionally, students documented these artists and the art through the production of a series of podcasts dedicated towards centering the voices of artists and community partners furthering public cultural production. 

Stories of Place: Documentary filmmaking workshop

• Fulfills the studio requirement for the Certificate in Urban Humanities.
• Info session recording here.

Documentary filmmaking can shed light on critical urban stories. In this documentary workshop students created a short documentary about contemporary social justice issues, a profile of an individual or organization  or a video essay.  Students conducted pre-production research and development and shot, wrote, and edited a 10 minute documentary. Each student was responsible for the production of their own film as reporters and producers of their projects. They collaborated with other team members in shooting and editing their films, serving as crew for each other. Final projects was screened on campus and is now available for use by community partners.

Some of the courses that count as prerequisites include the following, but independent studies and other courses are possible. Important: it is not sufficient to enroll in the prerequisite. You must also email Prof. Telles during the first week of the spring semester (or before) to get guidance on preparing your treatment. 

Ghosts and Visions: Using Augmented Reality and Physical Installations to Tell History and Envision Futures

In this Humanities Studio course students researched local histories and used methods that included installations in public space, augmented reality, and audio storytelling to convey what students learned. The study site is an old shoreline landfill called the Albany Bulb, and students investigated both the site itself and use it as a vista point to consider histories including Ohlone land use, 19th-century dynamite manufacturing, World War II industry, global container shipping, and Bay Area unhoused communities.  Students did archival research and considered questions of the best technologies–or non-technologies–to use to reveal the past and point to better futures. Students engaged in collaborative group work and created work that will be used by the general public.

Student work: Monuments to Extraction : Walking California History at the Albany Bulb

East Bay Revolution: Urban Spaces of Protest and Counterculture Practice

• Fulfills the studio requirement for the Certificate in Urban Humanities.

This course delves into the history of the East Bay in the 1960s and 1970s, with particular attention to the emergence of countercultural and social-movement communities. In this project-oriented course, students will work in teams as they reconstruct and analyze particular sites of protest and culture-making across the East Bay, from Berkeley to Emeryville and Oakland. Students will develop their own multi-media digital history projects, which will add significant new dimensions to the platform (The Berkeley Revolution) built by previous Cal undergraduates.

New Orleans: Historical Memory and Urban Design

• Fulfills the studio requirement for the Certificate in Urban Humanities.

How can a city’s past become a meaningful platform for its future? How can city planners and community organizations work to answer this question in historic neighborhoods destabilized by environmental catastrophe, gentrification, multi-scaled development and the privatization of schools and social services?

In this Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Research Studio, students will answer these questions by working in groups to create “paper monuments” (poster or other medium) proposing a public monument to a particular person, event, or movement from the history of New Orleans. Projects will consider setting as well as the substance and design of the proposed monument and will interface with Paper Monuments in New Orleans. The class will also produce a collaborative, interactive digital map of North Claiborne Avenue, representing public art (murals), street performance venues (Mardi Gras and second lines), and past and present neighborhood institutions (anchor businesses, parks, and community centers).

People and Places: Memory of Cityscapes

Since the camera’s invention in 1816, photographs have become vital to memory and historical explanation. By the faculty of a camera alone, one may now see history as well as read it. It is because of the interlacing process between captured image and moving history that the question of memory has become particularly salient, for in a world where “seeing is believing”, photographs furnish the evidence desired when doubts persist. There is no gain or object to debate that in this digital new age, photography operates as the vehicle to satisfy the needs and ways through which we connect with, and perhaps may begin to understand, one another. Indeed, photography has developed into a commerce between Art and Truth.

In this course, we will discuss the city(scape) as a whole and in part. Its premise will necessarily involve both written narratives and visual work. Along with a focus on migrants (or, the phenomenon of migration within, departure from, and entrance into the city), the course’s intention is to critically interrogate the racialization of space and spatialization of race. Within this framework, we will explore theories of home and built place, civic and aesthetic functions of urban space, collective memory and the picture-image, among other subjects. This course works to explore the following key questions:

What meanings do peple lend to their conditions and experiences in the city? How do migrants (moving in and out) shape and re-shape the structures of a city and its cultural landscape(s)? How can photographs tether home and place as realities for a body constantly being forced to move, to (re)adjust, to maneuver? And if home is a space that can be re-imagined and re-constructed, to what extent does, or can, memory aid in this process?

Adopting a qualitative methodology in examining everyday lived realities, this course seeks to first establish photography as a vessel of knowledge through which can be carried across time and space; that it contains a profound and abundant epistemology for a credible study worthy of pursuit and of examination as much as intrigue. Secondly, this course will demonstrate photography’s predominant theme of the presence of the absent (or the absent made present) and how it is a history of its own making. It is through this history that we may verify and explain historical phenomena such as diasporas, genocides, settlements and projects, movements and revolutions. Thirdly, we will speculate how photography allows for history to be “seen” as a project of visual imagination as much as “read” as a particular kind of literature; for visualization has always been entangled between the historical and the memorial. Expanding onto a global scale – examining cities across walls and borderlines – this course aims to transcend the city first as a condition of subjectivity before an object of analysis.  

The City and its People

Sicinius: What is the city but the people?
Citizens: True, the people are the city.
– Shakespeare, William. Coriolanus. Act 3 Scene 1.

What is the city but the people? Taking inspiration from William Shakespeare’s play “Coriolanus”, this interdisciplinary colloquium engages questions about the humans who inhabit urban spaces. Guest speakers from a variety of disciplines around UC Berkeley’s campus will present their research on urban life and urban form, providing a forum for lively discussion. Presenters will include faculty and several graduate students from departments including African American Studies, Architecture, Art History, City and Regional Planning, English, History, Music, Sociology, Spanish & Portuguese, and Theater, Dance & Performance Studies.

The​ ​colloquium​ ​is​ ​part​ ​of​ ​the​ ​Global​ ​Urban​ ​Humanities​ ​Initiative,​ ​a​ ​joint​ ​project​ ​of​ ​the​ ​Arts​ ​& Humanities​ ​Division​ ​and​ ​the​ ​College​ ​of​ ​Environmental​ ​Design.​ ​Our​ ​aim​ ​with​ ​this​ ​speaker​ ​series​ ​is​ ​to provide​ ​a​ ​gathering​ ​place​ ​where​ ​people​ ​from​ ​different​ ​disciplines​ ​can​ ​learn​ ​about​ ​each​ ​other’s​ ​work on​ ​global​ ​cities both historical and contemporary. The course provides an excellent introduction to the Undergraduate Certificate and Graduate Certificate in Global Urban Humanities. Drop-in visitors are welcome!

Siteworks: Understanding Place Through Design and Performance

• Fulfills the studio requirement for the Certificate in Urban Humanities.

Each year, we offer a fieldwork-based course that allows undergraduates to explore an urban Bay Area site using methods from architecture, city planning, the arts, performance, and the humanities.  This year, the Research Studio will focus on the Albany Bulb, a construction debris landfill in San Francisco Bay known for its informal art, spectacular views, and for many years, a longstanding homeless community.  What will the Bulb become?  Using methods of urban and natural observation and experiments in performance and documentation, students will seek to understand this complex space.

Siteworks: Understanding Place Through Design and Performance

The city is a social nexus. It binds people, things, forces, ideas together as a crossroads, grid, and network. But exactly how? And to what end? In this wide-ranging colloquium, speakers from a variety of disciplines will present research on the relational dynamic of cities. Speakers will include faculty and graduate students from departments including Architecture, Art History, Rhetoric, Classics, Italian Studies, English, History, City and Regional Planning, Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, and more.

Graduate Courses

Ecological Aesthetics: Reflections and Interventions for a More-Than-Human World

• Fulfills the Humanities Studio Requirement for the Certificate in Urban Humanities.

Scientists, politicians, activists, and policy-makers struggle to sensitize global citizens to the threat of climate change. Within this nexus, artists and cultural critics work to articulate and propel the role of the arts in climate advocacy and in the re-imagining the systems of the world. We will consider these and other questions throughout this graduate seminar and studio, integrating methods such as aesthetic analysis, social contextualization, archival research, community engagement, and curatorial experiments throughout the Bay Area. Final essays and projects will be developed in relation to the skill sets, partnerships, and disciplinary goals of enrolled students. Learn more here.

Multispecies Cities Studio

• Fulfills the Humanities Studio Requirement for the Certificate in Urban Humanities.

Beyond concerns for endangered species, city planners, architects, and urban designers rarely
think about animals. Yet cities are multispecies places full of vibrant matter: amidst the city’s
diverse neighborhoods and districts are creatures that fly, crawl, burrow, slither, jump and run –
and sing, grunt, cluck, bark, squeak, and buzz.

Through individual and group projects – such as creating biodiversity soundscapes, urban bird
hazard maps, multispecies green design codes, or pollinator-friendly urban transportation
systems – this studio will explore a key question: how can cities be planned, designed, and
governed to share space with the more-than-human world?

Readings may include authors such as Donna Haraway, Sunaura Taylor, Claire Jean Kim, Martha Nussbaum and Eva Meijer.

The Buzz Studio: Planning Equitable Cities for People and Pollinators

Link to project website here.

• Fulfills the studio requirement for the Certificate in Urban Humanities

The world’s people and ecosystems depend on pollinators such as bees, butterflies, insects, and fruit bats. Three-fourths of all flowering plants and 35% of all food crops worldwide need pollinators in order to reproduce. Yet many native pollinator populations are shrinking, and many are threatened or endangered due to habitat loss, pollution, agricultural insecticides, and competition from non-native species. Growing awareness of the plight of pollinators have catalyzed ‘pollinator city’ programs, employing a rich array of participatory strategies. They range from small scale community garden and green space efforts to city-wide efforts such Toronto’s Pollinator Protection Strategy and Oslo’s Bee Highway, from private developments such as Baseline, Colorado that feature a ‘pollinator district’ to Auckland’s ‘For the Love of Bees’ project led by artists, and ‘Ciudad Dulce’, Curridabat, Costa Rica’s urban plan that declares pollinators citizens of the city.

The Buzz Studio will partner with local environmental justice/community garden NGOs to co-create a pollinator cities program that simultaneously addresses environmental and ecological justice. The studio will develop strategies to increase food security and supports native pollinator populations. After an introduction to the challenges facing pollinator species and the variety of pollinator programs being undertaken around the world, the studio’s work will include research on the history of urban agriculture and community gardens in the Bay Area, documentation of loss of native pollinator habitat and populations over time, and assessment of current local pollinator-related projects. In collaboration with partners, students will develop community pollinator education and engagement strategies (including public art); design outreach tools to encourage planting native species that support food security as well as pollinators; propose urban design interventions to increase green space equity as well as support pollinator diversity; and build an online citizen-science program to monitor program impacts on residents and pollinators. 

Tres Hornos: Earthen Ovens and Foodways of the Southwest

• Fulfills the studio requirement for the Certificate in Urban Humanities

These graduate seminars, ranging across disciplines, bring collaborative approaches and team-teaching to graduate studies in the humanities. Teams include two faculty members from the Division of Arts & Humanities and one faculty member from an outside discipline. Seminars include up to eighteen graduate students from different disciplines. In the first half of the semester, explorations and readings are organized by the three faculty members. In the second half, the graduate students form small cohorts, each tasked with collaborating on a research paper, white paper, or conference panel related to a case study. Where possible, case studies engage outside experts such as editors, curators, and policy analysts.

This course centers on the design, construction, sustainable use, and experimental variables in archaeological feature visibility of a broadly used food technology, earthen ovens. Known as the horno in the US Southwest, this colonial introduction is the focus of our seminar, experimenting with construction techniques and using them to cook a variety of indigenous and introduced foods. Collaboratively-built hornos will be touchstones for exploring how cultural and historical tradition intersects with contemporary practice via 3D clay fabrication techniques and through the creative lens of installation, land art, and social practice. An attached small-scale garden project will provide a physical connection to ethnobotanical histories. Undergraduate and graduate students from across the university will work together to explore how the friction between empire and indigeneity can create both anxious and productive outcomes. Seminar participants will also participate in hands-on experiences building and cooking and examination of archaeological artifacts, among other learning modalities, to think about how colonial food practices shape(ed) contemporary ways of making, cooking, growing, and community building.

See course posting on Berkeley Academic Guide.

Place-Based Storytelling Techniques and Technologies

“Outside lies magic,” maintains the landscape historian John Stilgoe. Magic, for Stilgoe, is regaining a sense of history and awareness in everyday places, if only we can train our eyes to see beyond what we have taken for granted and train our bodies to explore the everyday.

In this colloquium we explored techniques of place-based storytelling through a series of guest speakers who are producers of place-based storytelling projects in the Bay area. What traditional and emerging technologies do they employ to create the experiences? What lessons can we learn from their efforts to point out local histories embedded in the landscape?

At a time when we are reconsidering how monuments and public spaces shape our understanding of history, recently developed projects tracing the sites of Black Panther history, queer activism, protest art, and environmental injustice attempt to be tools of activism by widening the “publics” who can know and champion one another’s experiences of place. 

Transformative Justice Studio: Storytelling and Policy in Oakland & Berkeley

In this studio course students explored how to partner with communities to carry out joint research and place-based storytelling at the intersections of two of the biggest racial injustice issues facing cities in the United States and other countries–mass incarceration and racial displacement.  Students learned about the principles of transformative justice–how to center the leadership and lived experiences of people impacted by racial injustices. Students experienced how academic research and/or story-telling skills could be applied in non-extractive, strategic, and spirit-lifting ways to support these grassroots led initiatives.  Students studied groundbreaking ordinances in Oakland and Berkeley that eliminate racialized housing discrimination against people returning home from mass incarceration and community efforts to reimagine policing.  Working with the racial justice organization Just Cities, students used lenses of racial justice and critical race theory and combine qualitative and quantitative analysis with oral history and arts approaches to understand and convey the impact of policy change utilizing a transformative justice model. Students produced public-facing analyses and narratives through means that may include storytelling, mapping, writing, video, photography, and a variety of arts-based approaches.

The Demos: Politics, Art, and the City

This theory and methods course examines a foundational set of readings in urban humanities. Required for the Graduate Certificate in Global Urban Humanities. For more, visit the Graduate Certificate Program page.

The “demos” suggests the people, so often referenced in political discourse as the core of democracy. Yet, from its inception, exclusions and the promised benefits for those who operate within the demos (in western societies typically as white citizens with property) have generated long-standing inequities and division. This course looks at contending struggles to undo and reconstitute the demos in urban spaces through art, performance, and media. We trace the ways in which various forms of collective political action recreate public space in metro areas around the world. From murals to graffiti, to digital media and music, to bridges and public schools, students will be exposed to interdisciplinary methods to analyze the built environments and how people move, work, eat, learn, listen and express themselves in these environments, in particular when people challenge meanings of demos and create new ones. Sites of interest may also include voting districts, town halls, streets and alleyways, museums, trains, eateries, and plazas as spaces of public political expression. Throughout, students will critically consider questions of how the demos and other systems of collective political action are constructed. How do different groups of people organize themselves within urban spaces? What forms of representation emerge that challenge or reinforce democratic practice, its ideals, and its failures? Students will work with a variety of methods including ‘hanging out,’ digital mapping, sensory observation, print-making design, and participant action planning to develop graduate-level research as portfolios or article/essay.

Throughout, students will be exposed to and critically consider different kinds of methodologies, including interview methods, observation, discourse analysis, formal analysis, archival research, and photography.

Enrollment for this course is first come, first serve. No application necessary.

For more information, contact Profs. Jason Luger (jdluger@berkeley.edu) and Angela Marino (angela.marino@berkeley.edu).

Berlin: The Guilt Environment

Since the city’s reunification in 1989, Berlin has intertwined its urban renewal with landscapes of reconciliation and commemoration. The “New Berlin” that politicians and city authorities imagined in the 1990s, after the Wende (or Fall of the Berlin Wall), was to be forged by international investment, materialized in high-profile commissions to “starchitects,” alongside preservation and memorialization of the city’s past, often seen through the seemingly inevitable lens of the Holocaust, and more recently Colonialism. Yet the relationship between developing a European metropolis and preserving sites of memory is troubled: projects throughout the city reveal how these ideas are reshuffled under the pressures of tourism, apology, foreign investment, and local activism. This makes Berlin the archetype of the contemporary guilt environment. This studio invites students to analyze, criticize, represent, and reimagine the form that memory and commemoration take in Berlin by asking how existing landscapes work and what new commemorative interventions might be necessary.

Fulfills the studio requirement for the Graduate Certificate in Global Urban Humanities. Priority enrollment to students pursuing the Certificate.

Application required and can be downloaded as a Word doc. APPLICATION DEADLINE HAS PASSED. WE ARE NO LONGER ACCEPTING APPLICATIONS FOR THIS COURSE.

Info sessions for this studio are scheduled for Thursday, October 3 10a and 1p in 305 Wurster. Students interested in applying to the Berlin course are encouraged to attend. See News + Events for details about the info sessions.

Questions about the course may be directed to Profs. Kroiz (kroiz@berkeley.edu) and Shanken (ashanken@berkeley.edu).

The City, Arts, and Public Space

This theory and methods course examines a foundational set of readings in urban humanities. Required for the Graduate Certificate in Global Urban Humanities. For more, visit the Graduate Certificate Program page.

Local urban practices and artistic interventions are recreating public spaces in metropolises around the world. This graduate seminar draws from different methods across the humanities and environmental design to explore some of these interventions and to theorize about the public character of the transformations that they provoke. This course is part of an initiative that aims to connect different disciplines to produce new knowledge, methods, and pedagogies for the understanding of metropolises worldwide.

We will juxtapose different methodological and theoretical debates to address questions such as: how can we conceive of the public in cities connected globally by communication technologies? What are the spaces and mechanisms for contesting and reconfiguring these publics? What are the assumptions behind terms such as “global city,” “megacity,” and “world city”? How are cities branded, made into spectacles, and represented? What are the potentials and what are the limits of the “creative class” discourse in arts-based urban planning? How is civic inequality reproduced locally and transnationally? How do new urban practices and artistic interventions affect configurations of gender, race, and the representation of violence? How is precarity reproduced and aestheticized? These questions will be addressed through readings and the investigation of selected cases both in the Bay Area and internationally.

Throughout, students will be exposed to and critically consider different kinds of methodologies, including interview methods, observation, discourse analysis, formal analysis, archival research, and photography.

For more information, contact Profs. Teresa Caldeira and Shannon Jackson.

Infrastructure Imaginaries: Informal Urbanism, Creativity, and Ecology in Lagos, Nigeria

Students will conduct intensive fieldwork in Lagos, Nigeria during spring break.

“Lagos, the city where nothing works but everything happens.” Nnedi Okorafor

Lagos is notorious for its ever-expanding population, massive infrastructural challenges, and controversial practices of state-sanctioned land capture. Neighborhoods branded as undesirable slums are razed—their inhabitants violently displaced and economies destroyed—as the region’s ecology is disrupted by the transformation of watery realms into habitable surfaces through landfilling. At the same time, the city is a dense hub of inspiring creativity, hustle, and entrepreneurship. Lagosians have devised ingenious ways of making things happen—often in the absence of functional formal systems, and in the face of outright state hostility.

In this course, we will employ analytics and methodologies from urban planning and visual culture studies to investigate how things happen in Lagos. We will pay particular attention to visual representation’s central role in struggles over land and competing visions of the Lagos of the future—visions that impact planning practices and people’s livelihoods in concrete ways. We will travel to Lagos to witness recent investment in public art and the state’s Mega City Project, including green initiatives like Eko Atlantic, an elite development project on a gated man-made island described by critics as eco-gentrification on a grand scale. We will consider these top-down attempts to beautify and rebrand the city alongside the violent displacement of legally-recognized waterfront slum communities. We will partner with community activists to develop interventions that build on local strategies of visual activism as co-production in securing the right to the city. We will also engage with artists and architects who draw from Lagos’ informality, creative transformations of land and material, and palimpsest of ecologies and spiritualities to imagine a future city for all.

Fulfills the studio requirement for the Graduate Certificate in Global Urban Humanities. Travel to Lagos will occur around spring break from March 20 – April 2, 2019.

Priority enrollment to students pursuing the certificate. Details on the Graduate certificate are here.

Attend one of the studio info sessions for more details:
Oct 5, 3pm in 305 Wurster
Oct 9, 12pm in 170 Wurster – part of The City and its People Colloquium

Application required. Download – Word doc DUE OCT 12

Questions about the course may be directed to Profs. Acey (charisma.acey@berkeley.edu) and Mills (ivymills@berkeley.edu)

Borderwall Urbanism

Application for course due 9/15– Word doc

Approval of instructors required for registration.  

Borderwall Urbanism (4 Units)

There are fourteen major sister cities along the United States – Mexico border whose urban, cultural, and ecological networks have been bifurcated by a borderwall. With 650 miles of wall already constructed, and the population in these urban areas expected to grow to over 20 million inhabitants over the next decade, the long-term effects of the wall’s construction must be carefully considered now in order to anticipate the consequences of its incision into a context of rapid growth and massive migratory flows, especially as the current political climate calls for further wall construction.

Using the U.S.- Mexico borderwall as a site of investigation, this experimental graduate seminar/studio class will explore the American borderwalled city as an evolving political, societal, historical, and cultural phenomena. Using experimental methods of analysis, fabrication, and collaboration, students will be challenged with examining the complex conditions of borderwall urbanism, creating objects and artistic responses to site and space. Several field trips will bring students directly to border sites and provide context and examples of innovative reactions that challenge preconceived notions of boundaries and territories. Students will learn from examples of artists, writers, and designers whose work is in reaction to the wall. The final project will consist of individual or collaborative works that will be deployed at a site along the border. Students from all departments are welcome. No previous mapping, design, or art experience is required.

Dates of Travel (to be confirmed)
Jan 18 – Jan 21 El Paso, TX / Juarez, Chihuahua
Mar 24 – Mar 31 San Ysidro, CA / Tijuana, Baja California
TBD Calexico, CA / Mexicali, Baja California

Areas of Focus

1. Historic Urban Analysis of 14 cities (GIS, Google Maps)
2. Case Studies in Design Activism and Social Practice
3. Crafted Site Responses
4. Bi-weekly online journal
5. Field Studies
6. Installations
7. Guest Speakers
8. Catalog

The City and its People

Sicinius: What is the city but the people?
Citizens: True, the people are the city.
– Shakespeare, William. Coriolanus. Act 3 Scene 1.

What is the city but the people? Taking inspiration from William Shakespeare’s play “Coriolanus”, this interdisciplinary colloquium engages questions about the humans who inhabit urban spaces. Guest speakers from a variety of disciplines around UC Berkeley’s campus will present their research on urban life and urban form, providing a forum for lively discussion. Presenters will include faculty and several graduate students from departments including African American Studies, Architecture, Art History, City and Regional Planning, English, History, Music, Sociology, Spanish & Portuguese, and Theater, Dance & Performance Studies.

The​ ​colloquium​ ​is​ ​part​ ​of​ ​the​ ​Global​ ​Urban​ ​Humanities​ ​Initiative,​ ​a​ ​joint​ ​project​ ​of​ ​the​ ​Arts​ ​& Humanities​ ​Division​ ​and​ ​the​ ​College​ ​of​ ​Environmental​ ​Design.​ ​Our​ ​aim​ ​with​ ​this​ ​speaker​ ​series​ ​is​ ​to provide​ ​a​ ​gathering​ ​place​ ​where​ ​people​ ​from​ ​different​ ​disciplines​ ​can​ ​learn​ ​about​ ​each​ ​other’s​ ​work on​ ​global​ ​cities both historical and contemporary. The course provides an excellent introduction to the Undergraduate Certificate and Graduate Certificate in Global Urban Humanities. Drop-in visitors are welcome!

Populism, Art, and the City

Populism is intrinsically about people, social interactions and collective identifications. But as much as it is embodied, populism also shapes—and is shaped by—urban environments around the world, constructing the very terms of ‘the people’ and civic belonging through various kinds of utopian, contingent and informal design.

This course will examine the core tenets of urban theory and performance studies through the framework of populism and populist art production in visual and performing arts, including theater, radio, film, social media, printmaking, posters, and street art. Themes will include theories of publics and crowds, populism as “style” in propaganda aesthetics and cultural semiotics, monumental and ordinary places, and the histories of enduring populist social movements. 

We will learn about marketplaces and plazas, city streets and neighborhoods, post offices, popular eateries, and shipyards—both locally and globally—to more fully engage with the political cultures and gathering grounds of collective action, public works, and government of the streets. Readings may include works by urban spatial, social and political theorists such as Clara Irazábal, Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, AbdouMaliq Simone, Jen Harvie, Partha Chatterjee, Jesús Martín Barbero, Ngugi Wa’ Thiong’o, David Harvey, and Bruno Latour. This is a course cross-listed as a Global Urban Humanities Core Seminar. Students will practice methods of mapping and ethnography, drawing from a range of case points in the humanities and urban studies. There will be smaller project assignments, workshops, and a final paper project ideal for developing dissertation chapters or towards master’s projects.

City as Nexus

The city is a social nexus. It binds people, things, forces, ideas together as a crossroads, grid, and network. But exactly how? And to what end? In this wide-ranging colloquium, speakers from a variety of disciplines will present research on the relational dynamic of cities. Speakers will include faculty and graduate students from departments including Architecture, Art History, Rhetoric, Classics, Italian Studies, English, History, City and Regional Planning, Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, and more.

The Museum and the City

Applications due August 19, 2016 for non-MLA and non-MCP students (see details below)

This graduate-level studio course will provide an opportunity for students from the arts and humanities, the environmental design disciplines, and other divisions and schools across campus to work together to investigate the relationship of a major cultural institution with its urban surroundings, and to propose physical and programmatic changes to those relationships. 

The Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) is a downtown institution with deep local roots, a diverse patronage, and a mission to serve as a place for community dialogue, knowledge and education. It sits on the edge of Lake Merritt, close to Oakland’s Civic Center, and is surrounded by ethnically diverse, rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods. Districts near the museum include Chinatown, Lakeside, Downtown, and Uptown.  Although the museum was established in response to progressive political movements of the 1960s, its physically fortresslike relationship to its surroundings is at odds with its mission.

Working with OMCA as well as the city of Oakland, Laney College, and SPUR Oakland, students will create art and design interventions for the neighborhoods near the museum. The purpose of these interventions is to support cultural expression that does not promote displacement but rather celebrates the history and current creative resources of these areas and empowers local residents by involving them directly in museum programs.

These interventions, to be designed and prototyped by the research studio in collaboration with local organizations and residents, will include diverse forms: material, narrative, visual, and poetic. At the conclusion of the research studio, OMCA will mount a ‘prototyping festival’ to allow residents to interact and react to the intervention ideas developed by the studio.

Students from all departments are welcome, and assignments will be designed to allow participants with different backgrounds to use skills in writing, interviewing, drawing, analyzing, photographing, designing, building, etc. to create collaborative work products.

The course will be taught by Walter Hood,  Professor of Landscape Architecture, with participation by faculty from the Arts & Humanities Division as well as by creative leaders in the community. Walter Hood is an artist, designer, and educator. Hood regularly exhibits and lectures on professional and theoretical projects nationally and internationally, while Hood Studio engages in architectural commissions, urban design, art installations, and research. In both teaching and practice, Walter Hood is committed to the development of environments which reflect their place and time specifically through how people inhabit various geographies. His interest in the re-construction of urban landscapes seeks to build palimpsests by developing new elements, spatial forms and objects which validate their existing familiar context. 

The course is part of the Global Urban Humanities Initiative, which studies global cities by combining methods from architecture, landscape architecture, city planning, and urban design with approaches from the arts and humanities. The Initiative supports new interdisciplinary courses, symposia, exhibitions, and publications, and is made possible with the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. 

ENROLLMENT: All UC Berkeley Master of Landscape Architecture students who are required to taked LDARCHC203 and Master of City Planning students required to take a studio will be admitted without application. Other students will be admitted to the course on the basis of their applications, with selection criteria designed to ensure a diverse mix of disciplines.  Application forms and instructions are available here and are due at 5 p.m. on Friday, August 19.  All applicants are also required to attend an information session at 5 p.m. on Monday, August 22 at 170 Wurster Hall.  Students chosen will be informed by 9 a.m. on Tuesday, August 23 and must confirm they will enroll by noon that day to allow for alternates in case of non-enrollment. The first day of class is Wednesday, August 24.

This studio course is one of three required courses for the upcoming graduate certificate in Global Urban Humanities.  Applications for the certificate are expected to be available in Spring 2017, and students taking this course can count it toward a future certificate.

Cities and Bodies

What does it mean for a human body to experience a city?  How does the built environment affect our feelings of safety, stimulation, and comfort? How do our assumptions about different users of public space affect design? What is the role of emotions and memory in our experience of cities? For whom are cities designed, and how does this design shape experiences for others?

How do we choose to represent cities and domestic spaces in children’s books, film, literature, and scholarship, and how do we represent people of different races, genders, abilities, and identities in those spaces? And how do these representations affect our experiences and the way cities are built and managed?

Some central themes we will be investigating are the tension between map and itinerary—between the totalizing, often single-moment, 2-dimensional snapshot from on high and the linear, landmark-oriented, street-level experience of a city.  The first view is often used by city planners, the second by novelists. What does each perspective have to offer and can they be combined through new technologies such as geolocated storytelling apps? We will be looking at the way that space and place interact and consider the neurological and bodily structures that affect our understanding of cities.

We will be examining methods of studying cities from different disciplines including anthropology, archaeology, architecture, city planning, journalism, literature, media studies, performance studies and urban design. In this wide-ranging colloquium, speakers from a variety of disciplines will offer perspectives on urban form and experience that are rooted in diverse and sometimes hybrid methodologies.

An important goal of the colloquium is to provide a gathering place where people from different disciplines can learn about each other’s work on global cities.  This colloquium is part of the Global Urban Humanities Initiative, a joint project of the Arts & Humanities Division and the College of Environmental Design.  The Initiative, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, supports interdisciplinary courses, symposia, exhibits, and publications. More information is available at globalurbanhumanities.berkeley.edu, where you can sign up for our email newsletter to be informed of speakers and events.

Mexico City: Materiality, Performance and Power

This interdisciplinary research studio will focus on Mexico City as a composite city: a complex space of palimpsest histories and possible futures that emerges through the materiality of urban experience. The course will explore the relationship between material histories, cultures and the performance of power through site-specific interventions and research projects based in three zones of engagement: the historic center, the Roma and Condesa neighborhoods, and the Western periphery. Student projects will be included in a subsequent book on Mexico City, to be published in English and Spanish, which expands on course themes and issues.

The class will be conducted as a project-based seminar. Students will be expected to participate in additional activities to be scheduled at a mutually convenient time, including film screenings, guest lectures, project pin-ups and/or research presentation related to individual and group projects. Students will develop an interdisciplinary toolkit of urban research methods and creative practices through participation in the course.

A funded field trip to Mexico City will take place from March 18-27, 2016.

City of Memory

Our cities are layered with pasts. Street names celebrate lost leaders and buildings provide tangible links to history. Monuments memorialize traumas that are also written on to the bodies of urban inhabitants. A palimpsest of destruction speaks to things that resist modern amnesia. How does the city inspire practices of remembering and forgetting? Whose past do we encounter and whose do we search for? How do we envision and shape ourselves as we destroy and preserve, create, recreate, and revive the city?

In this seminar we will explore theories of the city and built environment with a focus on memory. Considering the combined civic and aesthetic functions of urban spaces, we will examine topics ranging from collective memory to architectural revival and preservation, from historic parks to modes of commemoration enacted in temporary artistic forms.

The course will give students the opportunity to read widely across fields that link history, memory studies, and the built environment from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Texts may include John Ruskin on ruins, Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc on architectural preservation, Alois Riegl on conservation, Walter Benjamin on history, Henri Lefebvre on our right to the city, Paul Ricoeur on forgetting, Fredric Jameson and Svetlana Boym on nostalgia. We will also explore other ways of recalling a city’s past, including films and novels. Local sites will be both quarry and testing ground for our theoretical investigations. We may visit and study a variety of sites throughout the Bay Area, including San Francisco’s Holocaust Memorial by George Segal in Legion of Honor Park and National AIDS Memorial Grove in Golden Gate Park, as well as Richmond’s Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park and Berkeley’s People’s Park.

Sound and the City

This seminar takes place at the intersection of sound studies and urban studies, architectural theory and musicology, making and thinking. It asks what each of these practices, emerging and long-established, has to learn from a range of premises: that sound and space are inseparably entangled, that sound crucially shapes how we know the world, and that the modern city has long hosted distinctive configurations of sound in space. A series of distinguished guests — composers, DJs, philosophers of sound, sound designers, ethnomusicologists, and urbanists — will help lead the seminar through some of the following questions: How might taking sound seriously as a producer of knowledge change our approach to urban design, or how scholars should theorize the social landscape of the city? What are the relationships between the “organized sounds” produced by musicians and the many urban soundscapes to which they belong? How have historical and political factors delineated and delimited urban soundscapes in the cities of the global North and South? How have architecture and sound design recently informed and transformed each other?

Confirmed visitors include Thomas Y. Levin, Brian Kane, Steven Feld, Alexander Rehding and Paul Miller AKA DJ Spooky!

Mapping City Stories

In this interdisciplinary workshop-style course, graduate students from many disciplines will learn hands-on techniques of observing, analyzing and representing time, space, and experience in the urban realm in order to better understand and communicate about cities. Cities are physical places, but they are also assemblages of bodies and experiences; the locus and result of memory; and systems of interacting flows and institutions. Humans understand cities through linear narratives as well as spatial experience and representation. The way we analyze and represent these spaces and activities has important implications for the design, building, and management of cities as well as for our understanding of the history, art, and performance that occurs in urban settings and the ecosystems that support them.

In this course, we will sample techniques used in archeology, architecture, art history, art practice, city planning, ethnography, film, geography, journalism, landscape architecture, literature, and oral history to investigate and represent urban spaces. We will reflect on the ways that different disciplines approach urban problems and the methodological, ethical, and aesthetic dilemmas that occur in the process of interpreting and intervening in cities. We will question the ways we define and use evidence and reflect on our habits of representation.

Guest speakers will enhance the discussions of selected methods. Students will carry out field work and hands-on exercises in methods including mapmaking, GIS, drawing, interviewing, graphic design, photography, videos and using bodies to measure space.

Students will not master any of these methods in the short amount of time available. Rather, the course aims to give students enough experience with a technique to begin to understand its grammar, potential uses, and constraints, and to work in teams using those techniques. By the end of the course, students will be able to make basic maps, research posters, short videos, and effective slideshows about urban places, whether contemporary or historical.

No previous experience is necessary. For students who already have some background in these techniques, the course will be an opportunity to interrogate conventions of representation, experiment with new approaches, and engage in dialogue with faculty and students from outside urban planning about issues of analysis and intervention.

We will be examining novels, films, drawings, children’s books, journalism, videos, maps, plans, photos, and data visualizations as artifacts that are sources of information on cities; as modes of urban and spatial analysis; and as models of representation for expressing what we will find out in our research on city neighborhoods over the course of the semester.

Readings will provide a springboard for discussion of student experiences in workshop assignments. Authors and artists to be considered may include Raymond Carver, William Cronon, Guy Debord, James Joyce, Aldo Leopold, Kevin Lynch, Robert McCloskey, Franco Moretti, Jacob Riis, Miroslav Sasek, Akira Kurosawa, Ananya Roy, John Stilgoe, Edward Tufte, William Whyte, and Denis Wood.

By the end of the course, each student will have enhanced their ability to study urban places and to take informed action in cities through an improved knowledge of the context of their home discipline and an increased familiarity with other disciplines. Each student will have identified new methods that may merit further exploration depending on their research and practice directions.

Urban Space and Literary Form

Literature and urban civilization have long been intimately connected. Our seminar seeks to explore their connection as it relates to the emergence and global spread of the modern and contemporary city. How has the spatial and social organization of the modern city informed the thematic and formal choices writers make? And how, in turn, have the imaginative projections of literary texts shaped our experience of the city, its emancipatory potential and its alienating constraints? How exactly do cities get not merely mapped but also emplotted? What kinds of urban spaces and city-dwellers become the privileged focus of modern fiction and poetry? How do the density and scale of the urban built environment impinge on the way writers view the world and tell their stories? What genres seem best suited to rendering urban life? Is the city the defining context of modern literature or its implicit if barely human hero? To what extent is the global diffusion of the novel form related to the growth of urbanization?

Our seminar will read texts written over two centuries located in Paris, St. Petersburg, Cairo, Mexico City and Lahore. Our authors will be Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Louis Aragon, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Andrei Bely, Naguib Mahfouz, Carlos Fuentes, Roberto Bolaño and Mohsin Hamid. We will relate the rise of literary realism and modernism to the aesthetic and cognitive challenges posed by city life. We will retrace the familiar story of Paris as the cradle of urban modernity but also complicate that story as we move beyond the West to Latin America and the Islamic world.

Art + Village + City in the Pearl River Delta

Before its current incarnation as the “factory to the world” and one of the densest multi-city clusters in the world, the Pearl River Delta region (PRD) was covered with agricultural villages. These villages are today surrounded by urban development as “villages-in-the-city,” and are home to migrants from all over China. Due to their unique legal status acquired over the course of 20th century history, urban villagers are today among the few Chinese citizens who can control their own land, build their own houses and elect their own leaders. Since 2006, central and municipal government policies have sought to diminish village power, working to eliminate the village as an independent entity in the city. Art, design, and the creative economy has been central to this dynamic between the village and the city, and the “art village” has emerged as a transformative and distinctive urban phenomenon.

This research studio will critically investigate a wide range of urban art villages in the Pearl River Delta, exploring their historical development, current state, and future potential. These sites range from Dafen Oil Painting Village in Shenzhen, which exports hundreds of thousands of trade paintings around the world, to Xiaozhou Village in Guangzhou, where local artists and art teachers transformed village houses into studios and galleries, to the collaborative architectural project of Japanese architect Fujimoto and the avant-garde Vitamin Creative Space in Guangzhou. Throughout the region, villagers, artists, officials, migrants, developers, and entrepreneurs have leveraged art practices in order to reimagine urban life and urban citizenship. This studio documents and investigates their efforts, and will propose its own interventions.

Public Space: Placemaking and Performance

COURSE WEBSITE:  WWW.PLACEMAKINGANDPERFORMANCE.WORDPRESS.COM
COURSE BLOG:  WWW.PLACEMAKINGANDPERFORMANCE.WORDPRESS.COM/BLOG/

In this course, we will both investigate and intervene in the urban public realm. We will explore the contested normative frameworks that make up our notion of public space by examining the corpus of descriptive and prescriptive theories on the subject. We will test some of the central hypotheses that support such theories through student-led urban actions, involving impromptu performances and tactical placemaking.

In the first part of the class (Theory of Practice), we will conduct a critical review of an extensive selection of theoretical writings and work collaboratively on formulating a shared definition of the urban res publica.

In the second part of the class (Practice of Theory), we will try to measure the distance between our aspirations for public space and the reality of our urban surroundings by conceiving and staging a series of extemporaneous interventions across various Bay Area sites. The reactions we provoke may bring unspoken truths about our public realm to light and offer clues for future action for change.

Reading Cities, Sensing Cities

This interdisciplinary colloquium will present speakers investigating cities and urbanism from multiple angles—through texts about cities, through looking at cities as texts, through art, photography, sound and music, performance, mapping, and crowdsourced sensing technologies. Speakers will include faculty and graduate students from departments including Architecture, Art History, Art Practice, City and Regional Planning, Comparative Literature, Geography, Theater, Dance and Performance Studies, and more.

The colloquium is part of the Global Urban Humanities Initiative, a joint project of the Arts & Humanities Division and the College of Environmental Design. Our aim with this speaker series is to provide a gathering place where people from different disciplines can learn about each other’s work on global cities.

Requirements for S/U credit: Attend at least 9 of 12 lectures including the December 4 wrap-up session and write two brief blogposts for the Global Urban Humanities blog. There are no required readings. However, relevant readings, videos, etc. will be posted here in advance of each lecture. All lectures are open to the campus community, and visitors are encouraged. Please view the course syllabus for more information.

Sensing Cityscapes: Sensors, Cities, Policies/Basic Protocols for New Media

One of the oldest continuous human records is the water level of the Nile. Measured in a special edifice, the Nilometer provided many successions of Egyptian governments with the basic data to determine ideal times for farmers along the river to plant and harvest. With new media tools, we can measure ever more aspects of our interactions with natural and built environments, which could be described as urban metabolisms. But whether we can support better experiences for urban citizens with better measurements depends on many technical, political, cultural and design factors. How can we scale data from tiny sensors to individual people and to regional policies? In this methods course we will study the long chain of references which connect ground truth to data, data to information, information to people, and people to actions. We will address key questions about sensing the city including:

• Who is watching and why?
• What data is relevant to whom and in which timeframes?
• How can we collect and store data?
• How can we validate such data?
• How can we share and distribute data fairly?
• For whom will data yield actionable outcomes?
• Can the impact of actionable outcomes be validated with new data?
• How do data support or challenge existing city policies?
• How can designs and even policies respond to data?

We will address these questions conceptually and practically, as we follow the circulating references from need to data, and from data to action through applied studies. We will learn to make use of both technical and theoretical tools to create a common ground of sensing, and to make invisible dynamics of urban metabolisms visible to those who are affected the most. We will study existing data sources from airnow to nextbus, learn to connect to existing data streams, design, build and test new devices and interfaces, all with the objective of alleviating risk, stress, waste, and neglect in urban settings. All along, we will critically consider the limits of optimization and data-driven decision making, the conditions of inclusion and exclusion created with any technology, and the impact of data on intangible human experiences.

Through a suite of practical projects, the course introduces methods for retrieving and working with existing city data, investigating cities through surveys and mapping, generating data through digital sensing and ways of presenting data publicly. Project partners for this course are BART, EBALDC, the City of Berkeley, Youth Radio and data.acgov.org.

A slideshow on the course narrated by Prof. Niemeyer can be seen here.

No Cruising

This research studio will investigate the multiple themes generated by the concept of mobility (and its inverse: immobility) in Los Angeles. While the city’s automobility has become a questionable cliche, the question of mobility affects almost every sphere of life for its urban residents. The studio will focus on exploring the ways individuals and groups experience mobility and immobility, using methods from ethnography, history, material culture studies, literature, and visual and performance studies. One of the key efforts of the studio will be to create hybrid forms of urban representation juxtaposing humanities perspectives with spatial and movement studies. Together with faculty, students will make several trips to Los Angeles to explore the city, meet with local artists, writers, scholars, civic advocates, engineers and residents. The studio will culminate in visual, textual, and digital versions of student and faculty research.

To learn more about how a studio class functions, see Margaret Crawford’s presentation about studio courses.

The City and its Moving Images

What is the city? Is it a space, a place, a process, or practice? Is it actual or virtual? How do we demarcate the spatial and temporal limits of the city? How does the city become a unit of social space and experience? How does such a unit register both social contiguity and tension in spatial terms and recast relations of gender, class, race, and other power configurations such as the global and local? How are the changing experience of the city perceived and mediated through film and other media? How do media technologies and their aesthetic articulations create and occupy actual and virtual spaces of the city and contribute to its demise and transformations?

Taking the city as the concentrated and contested site, this class examines key issues of urban modernity and postmodernity at the intersection of urban planning, architecture, and film and media.

The purpose of this jointly-taught doctoral-level seminar is to examine the fundamental precepts of approaches to urban theory, method, and analysis that characterize disciplines in the humanities and environmental design. Its specific goal is to explore the extent to which integrating the diversity of these approaches is possible and/or desirable, and the extent to which this integration could advance understanding, research practices, and pedagogy in global urban humanities disciplines.

The course has two phases:

Ways of Seeing the City, focusing on key words in the urban question (such as city, scale, and representation), as well as established options in theory, method and practice that are current in contemporary urban-oriented disciplines.

The Urban Question after Modernity, including manifestations of globalization, hybridity, sustainability, and socio-economic polarization, as well as changing urban spaces (corporate spaces, networked/cyber city, urban ruins, and hypertopia) to explore convergences and concordances in an integrated ‘global urban humanities.’

The City, Arts, and Public Space

Local urban practices and artistic interventions are recreating public spaces in metropolises around the world. This cross-listed graduate seminar draws from different methods across the humanities and environmental design to explore some of these interventions and to theorize about the public character of the transformations that they provoke. This course is part of an initiative that aims to connect different disciplines to produce new knowledge, methods, and pedagogies for the understanding of metropolises worldwide.

We will juxtapose different methodological and theoretical debates to address questions such as: how can we conceive of the public in cities connected globally by communication technologies? what are the spaces and mechanisms for contesting and reconfiguring these publics? what are the assumptions behind terms such as “global city,” “megacity,” and “world city”? how are cities branded, made into spectacles, and represented? what are the potentials and what are the limits of the “creative class” discourse in arts-based urban planning? how is civic inequality reproduced locally and transnationally? how do new urban practices and artistic interventions affect configurations of gender, race, and the representation of violence? how is precarity reproduced and aestheticized? These questions will be addressed through readings and the investigation of selected cases both in the Bay Area and internationally.

Throughout, students will be exposed to and critically consider different kinds of methodologies, including interview methods, observation, discourse analysis, formal analysis, archival research, and photography. In addition to the two instructors from different Colleges on campus, the course will invite visiting lecturers to join selected discussions that will be open to a wider public of faculty, students, and Bay Area colleagues. Some of the authors to be engaged during the course might include: Filip de Boeck, Teresa Caldeira, Néstor Garcia Canclini, Guy Debord, TJ Demos, Rosalind Deutsche, Jen Harvie, Jurgen Habermas, Shannon Jackson, Grant Kester, Miwon Kwon, Henri Lefebvre, Achille Mbembe, Sarah Nuttall, Jacques Rancière, Saskia Sassen, Rebecca Solnit, and Thomas Sugrue.