Cities and Sites

4 credits · Undergraduate

This course explores cities and landscapes as layered repositories of history, both ecological and human. Examining environmental design history and practice, it highlights how deep time legacies are acknowledged or ignored in placemaking, including racialized spatial histories. In addressing the role of architecture, city planning, and landscape design in shaping places and giving them meaning, the course explores the diversity of spatially defined experiences and the ways in which they are shaped by policy and professional practice. Case studies on Bay Area urban and social geography are linked with transnational histories and design movements to highlight the larger forces that have shaped the local historical and social landscape.