Description
This course brings together urban theory and environmental studies in a global perspective, approaching the two as intertwined fields of inquiry, knowledge, and world-making. It establishes a framework for the study of a wide range of agents and patterns of spatial production and their effects on societies, cultures, economies, and ecosystems—from the local to the metropolitan, and from the territorial to the planetary scale. Through readings, response papers, field-based learning, lectures, project work, and class discussions students will learn to approach the urbanized environment analytically. Building on ideas from urban studies and theory, history of architecture and urban design, landscape and environmental humanities, as well as anthropology and geography, the course is intended to equip students with foundational spatial and environmental literacy critical to any considered design interventions in physical or cultural space.