Dubois Meets Churchill: Social Justice & the Built Environment

3 units

Winston Churchill famously stated, We shape our buildings and afterwards, our buildings shape us. W.E.B. DuBois equally famously stated, The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line. This course is about what happens (and has happened, and perhaps could happen) at the intersection of those two quotes. With the built environment always in the middle of the table, but never in isolation, students in this course will consider its role relative to social justice as viewed through a multitude of lenses. Schedules permitting, faculty from other schools in the university might also offer their perspectives on how their respective disciplines touch on issues of social justice and the built environment. There might also be field trips to a few selected locations around St. Louis where some of these issues have played out or are playing out. This course will deal with many of the issues that the fall course, Community Building/Building Community, deals with, but in a lecture format. This is partly the result of weather constraints (the Spring semester is not as amenable to extensive field trips as the Fall semester is), but it will also allow students who can only take a Spring course to do so, and in a more traditional lecture format, without as many tours and without the community service requirement.