Segregation By Design: A Historical Analysis of the Impact of Planning and Policy in St. Louis

3 units

This course aims to examine the causes and consequences of American Apartheid and racial residential segregation in metropolitan St. Louis and propose a report that suggests potential mitigation strategies for a given community. This transdisciplinary seminar, bridging humanities and architecture, introduces students to research, theories, and debates currently being conducted on issues of segregation, city planning, urban policy, and sustainability . By placing these debates in a historical and local context, students will discover how policy and decision-making are entrenched in racial, cultural, physical, and socio-economic segregation and engender the spatial transformation of America's divided cities. Students will learn to evaluate and analyze policy and planning throughout the history of the neighborhood to ultimately understand the physical manifestation of segregation during growth and decline. Taking advantage of the academic resources in the region, the course offers a cross-university, cross-disciplinary environment to respond to the importance of this issue. Student teams develop mitigation plans for selected communities in the St. Louis metropolitan region. The teams will be assisted by volunteer professional mentors from diverse fields and residents from the selected communities. The final product of the student teams will be a book that will be a compilation of the work of the students in detailing the history of the communities, causes, and consequences of segregation, as well as potential policy and design strategies.