Mar 29, 2024  
Catalogue 2022-2023 
    
Catalogue 2022-2023 [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

Add to Portfolio (opens a new window)

URBS 282 - American Landscapes: History,Politics,& Built Environments

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)


(Same as GEOG 282 )  This course invokes landscape as a means to study American history, politics, and geography. It introduces ways of seeing, interpreting, describing, and speculating on how everyday built environments in the United States and its colonial precursors have shaped and given meaning to social and political life. To that end, the class surveys the production and transformation of vernacular spaces at a variety of scales: fields, fences, rivers, houses, workplaces, parks, towns, billboards, road patterns, transit infrastructures, residential and commercial developments, and more. It pays close attention to the coincidence of social orderings and spatial forms: the hierarchical web, the interchangeable grid, the specialized complex, and the interconnected system. In so doing, it presents an eclectic history of lay and official attempts to understand, define, represent, plan, and intervene in the spaces and lives of ordinary people. Our overarching task in this class is twofold: to grasp how the making of landscapes inflects collective ways of being and to trace how the past continues to animate the multiple and overlapping worlds we inhabit.

  The Department.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS



Add to Portfolio (opens a new window)