Second World Urbanism: Landscape Infrastructures

3.0 credits · Graduate

The course centers the historical intersection of industrialization, environmentalism, and urbanism in the so-called Second World. It explores the 20th-century history of urban ecological design, focused on ‘landscape infrastructures’ e.g. urban parks, ecosystem services, industrial and communal hygiene, and systems of society-nature relations. Students will apply critical and comparative analysis to the question of when, where and how urbanists’ systems for urban environments and infrastructures proved (un)sustainable. What was the socialist dream of green cities? How did it vary across state-socialist contexts? What has happened to those dreams over time? More specifically, how did urbanists and affiliated specialists approach the design, construction and maintenances of built environments relative to state socialist political, economic and cultural conditions?