Spring 2021

Description:

One’s home is the first site of self-identity, socialization, and notions of citizenship. In the United States, neighborhoods are the basic units of political organization, educational options, and policing trends. This course explores the intersections between race and housing in the United States with a specific focus on the experiences of African-Americans in urban centers. The intersectional housing experiences of Asian, Latinx, first-generation immigrants, and indigenous communities will also be analyzed.

This course represents both a timely and nuanced opportunity to address housing as a focal point of existing racial tensions and deepening socio-economic inequalities in the U.S. Students will also have a critical understanding of the underlying structural causation for the issues faced by minority populations seeking adequate, affordable, and safe housing in the U.S.

Students will further their competency in associated development topics including globalization, commodification, and social justice. Course topics include:

• Gentrification and housing affordability
• Housing segregation and public education
• Hurricanes Katrina and Maria
• Flint water crisis
• Over-policing in Ferguson, Missouri

Instructor:

Dr. Tyeshia Redden, Mellon Junior Fellow in Humanities, Urbanism, and Design

Day/Time:

Fridays, 2-5PM

This seminar will address the diverse narratives of ecological thinking in the history of art, architecture, and urban planning during the 20th century. The course will contextualize and interrogate contemporary disciplinary discourses as well as historical assumptions related to ecological thinking in art and architectural history and environmentally-conscious practices. By mapping received trajectories of Eco Art, Ecocritical Art History, and Ecological Histories of Architecture and Urban Planning, the course will work from a subtly hidden foundation of eco-historical knowledge that connects these fields of inquiry, while also critiquing these trajectories and seeking to provide more focused and robust alternatives for knowledge production in the present. It aims to attract students from the School of Arts and Sciences and the Weitzman School of Design in a discussion on the interconnected histories of art and architecture during the 20th century.

Instructors:

Mantha Zarmakoupi, History of Art (SAS), and Daniel Barber, Architecture (Design) 

Day/Time:

Thursdays, 1:30-4:30PM

Spring 2021

Description:

For more than a century, scholars of modern industrial cities have deliberated over how to both fix the city as an object of analysis, and yet make legible the immense processes of transformation in cities. This course treads through this conundrum by exploring how cities are constituted through the production, consumption, management, disposal, and movement of waste. Through the course of the semester, we are going to locate the urban in the forms, flows and futures of wasting. Thus we will reflect on the city as a space that not only produces and consumes valuable matter, but also as one that generates ambiguous matter, such as waste, that is at once stripped off its value and valuable. By triangulating readings from anthropology, geography, history and literature, in this course we will reconceptualize urbanity and urban citizens by considering how the collective life of the city is constituted in and through residents’ relationship to waste. We will pay attention to the differential responsibilities and effects of wasting the city while also poisoning the bodies that reside within it. We will look at waste as political and social matter. In doing so, we will rethink both the contours and the hierarchies of political communities. Thus, this course will explore the inflection of waste and practices of wasting through race, gender, sexuality, class and nationality, among other cultural markers. The course will begin by paying attention to where the city exists and who constitute the city by reading foundational texts such as De Certeau’s “Walking in the City” in conversation with Parsons’ “Re-envisioning the urban walker.” We will then consider what materials, subjectivities, and sensory attunements constitute waste in the city, and move on to examining topics such as “Waste work in the city,” “Toxic-city,” “Waste city affects,” “Clean(s)ing the City,” “Colonial routes of wasting,” “Refusal,” and finally, “Waste Futures.” Readings will include Zygmunt Bauman,Mary Douglas, Rosalind Fredericks, Vinay Gidwani,MaxLiboiron,Martin Melosi, Katherine Millar, Robin Nagle, Joshua Reno, John Scanlan, and Nicholas Shapiro, among others.

Instructor:

Dr. Syantani Chatterjee, Mellon Junior Fellow in Humanities, Urbanism, and Design

Day/Time:

Tuesdays, 1-4PM

Spring 2021

H+U+D ANCHOR INSTITUTION SEMINAR

Description:

The Inclusive City: Participatory Design at Taller Puertorriqueño seminar will provide students across various fields with the opportunity to learn from and with Taller Puertorriqueño about community, spacemaking, and memorialization in the built environment. Supported by the University of Pennsylvania’s Humanities+Urbanism+Design (H+U+D) Initiative, the course is offered in collaboration with Taller Puertorriqueño as a vehicle to explore and examine Philadelphia as a laboratory for the study of diversity, equality and inclusion. Taller, the 2020-2021 H+U+D anchor institution, is a community-based cultural organization whose primary purpose is to preserve, develop and promote Puerto Rican arts and culture in the City of Philadelphia.

Centered on the Fairhill neighborhood, The Inclusive City seminar will focus on a North Philadelphia Puerto Rican community’s efforts to tell its own history through the built environment. Through our engagements in the community, students will develop methodological skills, including neighborhood mapping, engaging primary sources in the Taller archives, and participating in a community charette. As a truly interdisciplinary course, students will utilize design concepts, historical methods, and ethnoracial lenses of analysis throughout the semester. Drawing on these theoretical and methodological approaches, students will produce sustainable, community-informed design plans that align with Taller’s programmatic goals.

Instructors:

Daniel Morales-Armstrong, Africana Studies (School of Arts and Sciences); in partnership with Taller Puertorriqueño

Spring 2021

H+U+D CITY SEMINAR

Description:

This is a seminar about Tang China and Nara Japan, and Early Heian Japan, Unified Silla Korea, Northeast Asia under Parhae, and Uyghur Inner Asia through their cities, palaces, monasteries, Buddhist art, and painting.  We begin by studying material remains of the two best-documented civilizations of East Asian in the seventh-ninth centuries.  Focusing on material remains of Tang China and Nara Japan, we investigate the validity of the frequent assessment of this period as “international Tang.” We then move to Korea, Mongolia, and Central Asia.

Students will have a wide range of topics to work on.  They will be encouraged to find comparative topics.  This seminar is an opportunity for students to use Chinese, Japanese, or Korean in research papers, but the course has no prerequisites. There are no exams.  Readings will be assigned to the whole group and to individual students for short presentations every week. Undergraduates will write one short and one long paper.  Graduate students will write and present research papers.

Instructors:

Nancy S. Steinhardt, East Asian Languages and Civilizations (School of Arts and Sciences); with guest lecture by Zhongjie Lin, City and Regional Planning (Design)

Time:

Tuesdays, 7:00-10:00 p.m.