Past Graduate Course Offerings

The Buzz Studio: Planning Equitable Cities for People and Pollinators

Instructor: Jennifer Wolch

The Buzz Studio partnered with Peralta Hacienda Historical Park in Oakland’s Fruitvale District to explore ways to create a more equitable multispecies city. Learn more.

Tres Hornos: Earthen Ovens and Foodways of the Southwest

Instructors: Jun U. Sunseri, Ronald L. Rael, Stephanie Syjuco

This course focused on the design, construction, sustainable use, and experimental variables in archaeological feature visibility of a broadly used food technology, earthen ovens. Learn more.

Transformative Justice Studio: Storytelling and Policy in Oakland & Berkeley

Spring 2021 Studio
Instructors: Charisma Acey and Margaretta Lin

This studio course 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.  Learn more.

The Demos:
Politics, Art, and the City

Spring 2020 Seminar

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. Learn more.

Berlin: The Guilt Environment

Spring 2020 Studio

The GUH Interdisciplinary Graduate Research Studio for 2020 will examine memory, trauma and tourism in Berlin. Learn more.

The City, Arts, and Public Space

Spring 2020, 2019, 2017 Seminar

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. Learn more.

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

Spring 2019 Studio

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. Learn more.

Borderwall Urbanism

Spring 2018 Studio

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. Learn more.

The City and its People

Fall 2018 Colloquium

What is the city but the people? Taking inspiration from William Shakespeare’s play “Coriolanus”, this interdisciplinary colloquium engaged questions about the humans who inhabit urban spaces. Learn more.

Populism, Art, and the City

Spring 2018 Seminar

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. Learn more.

City as Nexus

Fall 2017 Colloquium

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 presented research on the relational dynamic of cities. Learn more.

The Museum and the City

Fall 2016 Studio

This graduate-level studio course provided 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. Learn more.

Cities and Bodies

Fall 2016 Studio

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? Learn more.

Mexico City: Materiality, Performance and Power

Spring 2016 Studio

This interdisciplinary research studio focused on Mexico City as a composite city: a complex space of palimpsest histories and possible futures that emerges through the materiality of urban experience. Learn more.

City of Memory

Spring 2016 Seminar

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? Learn more.

Sound and the City

Spring 2016 Seminar

This seminar took place at the intersection of sound studies and urban studies, architectural theory and musicology, making and thinking. It asked 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. Learn more.

Mapping City Stories

Fall 2015

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. Learn more.

Mexico City: Seminar

Fall 2015 Seminar

This interdisciplinary seminar constructed a cross-section through the complex history of Mexico City, beginning with the Aztec period in the 14th century, and culminating in the global present. The course was at once an attempt to provide a comprehensive understanding of the rich layers of culture that interact to form Mexico City’s history, and an inquiry into the theories and methods of global urban and architectural research, using one of the world’s largest and most dynamic cities as a case study. Learn more.

Urban Space and Literary Form

Fall 2015 Seminar

Literature and urban civilization have long been intimately connected. Our seminar sought 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? Learn more.

Art + Village + City in the Pearl River Delta

Spring 2015 Studio

This research studio critically investigated 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. Learn more.

Public Space: Placemaking and Performance

Spring 2015

This course investigated and intervened in the urban public realm. We explored 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 tested some of the central hypotheses that support such theories through student-led urban actions, involving impromptu performances and tactical placemaking. Learn more.

Reading Cities, Sensing Cities

Fall 2014 Colloquium

This interdisciplinary colloquium presented 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. Learn more.

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

Fall 2014 Studio

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? Learn more.

No Cruising

Spring 2014 Studio

This research studio investigated 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 focused 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. Learn more.

The City and its Moving Images

Spring 2014 Seminar

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? Learn more.

The City, Arts, and Public Space

Fall 2013 Seminar

Local urban practices and artistic interventions are recreating public spaces in metropolises around the world. This cross-listed graduate seminar drew 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 was part of an initiative that aims to connect different disciplines to produce new knowledge, methods, and pedagogies for the understanding of metropolises worldwide. Learn more.