Community Building

3 units

This course looks at the intersection of the built fabric and the social fabric. Using St. Louis as the starting point, this course takes students out of the classroom and into a variety of neighborhoods -- old, new, affluent, poor -- to look at the built environment in a variety of contexts and through a variety of lenses. Almost every week for the first half of the semester, students visit a different area of the city, with each trip highlighting some theme or issue related to the built environment. These include topics such as architecture, planning, American history, investment and disinvestment, community character and values, race, transportation, immigrant communities, and future visions. Running parallel to this, students will be involved in an ongoing relationship with one particular struggling neighborhood, in which students will attend community meetings and get to know and become involved with the people of the community in a variety of ways. Students learn to look below the surface and beyond the single obvious story for multiple stories to discover complexity, contradictions and paradoxes. They also come to consider the complex ways in which architecture and the built environment can affect or be affected by a host of other disciplines.