For a list of current and upcoming courses, please visit the Graduate Certificate Core Course List and the Elective Course List.
Spring 2020
The Demos: Politics, Art and the City (CORE SEMINAR)
This course looks at contending struggles to undo and reconstitute the demos in urban spaces through art, performance, and media. More
Berlin: The Guilt Environment (CORE STUDIO)
This studio invites students to analyze, criticize, represent, and reimagine the form that memory and commemoration take in Berlin by asking how existing landscapes work and what new commemorative interventions might be necessary. More
Spring 2019
The City, Arts and Public Space (CORE SEMINAR)
Students will be exposed to and critically consider different kinds of methodologies, including interview methods, observation, discourse analysis, formal analysis, archival research, and photography. More
Infrastructure Imaginaries in Lagos, Nigeria (CORE STUDIO)
In this course, students will employ analytics and methodologies from urban planning and visual culture studies to investigate how things happen in Lagos. More
Fall 2018
THE CITY AND ITS PEOPLE (Colloquium)
This interdisciplinary colloquium provide a gathering place where people from different disciplines can learn about each other’s work on global cities both historical and contemporary. More
Spring 2018
POPULISM, ART, AND THE CITY (CORE SEMINAR)
This course will examine the core tenets of urban theory and performance studies through the framework of populism and populist art production in visual and performing arts. More
Borderwall Urbanism (CORE STUDIO)
This course will bring students directly to border sites and provide context and examples of innovative reactions that challenge preconceived notions of boundaries and territories. Students will learn from examples of artists, writers, and designers whose work is in reaction to the wall. The final project will consist of individual or collaborative works that will be deployed at a site along the border. Students from all departments are welcome. More
Fall 2017
CITY AS NEXUS (Colloquium)
The interdisciplinary colloquium provides a gathering place where people from different disciplines can learn about each other’s work on global cities. More
SPRING 2017
THE CITY, ARTS, AND PUBLIC SPACE
Local urban practices and artistic interventions are recreating public spaces in metropolises around the world. This graduate seminar draws from different methods across the humanities and environmental design to explore some of these interventions and to theorize about the public character of ... more
FALL 2016
THE MUSEUM AND THE CITY: Studio
This graduate-level studio course will provide an opportunity for students from the arts and humanities, the environmental design disciplines, and other divisions and schools across campus to work together to investigate the relationship of a major cultural institution with its urban surroundings, and to propose physical and programmatic changes to ... more
CITIES AND BODIES
What does it mean for a human body to experience a city? How are the everyday performances of bodies of different races, genders, and identities seen in the context of urban built form? What is the relationship between the infrastructure that brings resources including food and water into a city, and the human and other organisms that consume them there? How do notions of bodies operate in the virtual cities of video games? How are cities embodied in literary texts? How do we interpret the ... more
SPRING 2016
City of Memory
Andrew Shanken, Dept. of Architecture, College of Environmental Design
Lauren Kroiz, Dept. of Art History, College of Letters & Science
In this seminar we will explore theories of the city and built environment with a focus on memory. Considering the combined civic and aesthetic functions of urban spaces, we will examine topics ranging from collective memory to architectural revival and preservation, from historic parks to modes of commemoration enacted... more
Mexico City: Studio
MATERIALITY, PERFORMANCE AND POWER
C. Greig Crysler, Dept. of Architecture, College of Environmental Design
Angela Marino, Dept. of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, College of Letters & Science
María Moreno Carranco, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Cuajimalpa
This research studio course will travel to Mexico City to investigate approaches to aesthetics and activism within its layered and complex urban spaces. Considering the city space as a dynamic and fluid environment, a place of (sometimes violent) meeting and exchange, and its integral relationship to other city spaces... more
Sound and the City
Nicholas Mathew, Dept. of Music, College of Letters & Science
Nicholas de Monchaux, Dept. of Architecture, College of Environmental Design
This seminar takes place at the intersection of sound studies and urban studies, architectural theory and musicology, making and thinking. It asks what each of these practices, emerging and long-established, has to learn from a range of premises: that sound and space are inseparably entangled, that sound crucially shapes... more
Fall 2015
Mapping City Stories
PEOPLE, NARRATIVE, DATA, IMAGE AND PLACE
Susan Moffat, Global Urban Humanities Initiative
In this interdisciplinary workshop-style course, graduate students from many disciplines will learn hands-on techniques of observing, analyzing and representing time, space, and experience in the urban realm in order to better understand and communicate about cities. In this course, we will sample techniques used in archeology, architecture... more
Mexico City
SPACES/CULTURES/HISTORIES
C. Greig Crysler, Dept. of Architecture, College of Environmental Design
Open to students from all departments, this interdisciplinary seminar will construct a cross-section through the complex history of Mexico City, beginning with the Aztec period in the 14th century, and culminating in the global present. The course is at once an attempt to provide a comprehensive understanding of the rich layers... more
Urban Space and Literary Form
WORLD LITERATURE AND THE MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY CITY
Mia Fuller, Dept. of Italian Studies, College of Letters & Science
Harsha Ram, Dept. of Comparative Literature and Slavic Languages and Literatures, College of Letters & Science
This seminar seeks to explore the connection between literature and urban form in the modern and contemporary world. How have cities' spatial and social organization informed the thematic and formal choices writers make? And how, in turn, have the imaginative projections of literary texts shaped our experience of the city... more
Spring 2015
Art + Village + City in the Pearl River Delta: Studio
A GLOBAL URBAN HUMANITIES RESEARCH STUDIO
Margaret Crawford, Dept. of Architecture, College of Environmental Design
Winnie Wong, Dept. of Rhetoric, College of Letters & Science
This research studio will critically investigate a wide range of urban art villages in the Pearl River Delta, exploring their historical development, current state, and future potential. Throughout the region, villagers, artists, officials, migrants, developers, and entrepreneurs have leveraged art practices in order to reimagine... more
Public Space: Placemaking and Performance
THEORIES OF PRACTICE AND PRACTICE OF THEORIES
COURSE WEBSITE: https://placemakingandperformance.wordpress.com/
COURSE BLOG: https://placemakingandperformance.wordpress.com/blog/
Ghigo DiTommaso, Dept. of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, College of Environmental Design
Erika Chong Shuch, Dept. of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies, College of Letters & Science
In this course, we will both investigate and intervene in the urban public realm. We will explore the contested normative frameworks that make up our notion of public space by examining the corpus of descriptive and prescriptive theories on the subject. We will test some of the central hypotheses that support such theories... more
Fall 2014
Reading Cities, Sensing Cities
AN INTERDISCIPLINARY COLLOQUIUM
Susan Moffat, Global Urban Humanities Initiative
This interdisciplinary colloquium will present speakers investigating cities and urbanism from multiple angles—through texts about cities, through looking at cities as texts, through music and sound, film, performance, art, photography, mapping, and crowdsourced sensing technologies... more
SENSING CITYSCAPES: SENSORS, CITIES, POLICIES/BASIC PROTOCOLS FOR NEW MEDIA
AN INTERDISCIPLINARY GRADUATE METHODS COURSE TO CREATE AND INTERROGATE TOOLS FOR COLLECTING DATA ON URBAN METABOLISMS
Greg Niemeyer, Dept. of Art Practice, College of Letters & Science, Berkeley Center for New Media
Ronald Rael, Dept. of Architecture, College of Environmental Design
One of the oldest continuous human records is the water level of the Nile. Measured in a special edifice, the Nilometer provided many successions of Egyptian governments with the basic data to determine ideal times for farmers along the river to plant and harvest. With new media tools, we can measure ever more aspects... more
Spring 2014
The City and Its Moving Images: Urban Theory, Media Theory
Weihong Bao, Dept. of Film & Media Studies and East Asian Languages & Culture, College of Letters & Science
Michael Dear, Department of City and Regional Planning, College of Environmental Design
What is the city? Is it a space, a place, a process, or practice? Is it actual or virtual? How do we demarcate the spatial and temporal limits of the city? How does the city become a unit of social space and experience? How does such a unit register both social contiguity and tension in spatial terms and recast relations of gender... more
NO CRUISING: Mobile Identities and Urban Life: Studio
A MULTI-DISCIPLINARY RESEARCH STUDIO INVESTIGATING LOS ANGELES
Margaret Crawford, Dept. of Architecture, College of Environmental Design
Anne Walsh, Dept. of Art Practice, College of Letters & Science
This research studio will investigate the multiple themes generated by the concept of mobility (and its inverse: immobility) in Los Angeles. While the city’s automobility has become a questionable cliche, the question of mobility affects almost every sphere of life for its urban residents. The studio will focus... more
Fall 2013
The City, Arts, and Public Space: Methods Across Disciplines
Teresa Caldeira, Dept. of City & Regional Planning, College of Environmental Design
Shannon Jackson, Dept. of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies, Rhetoric, College of Letters & Science, Arts Research Center
Local urban practices and artistic interventions are recreating public spaces in metropolises around the world. This cross-listed graduate seminar draws from different methods across the humanities and environmental design to explore some of these interventions and to theorize about the public character of the transformations... more
For a list of current and upcoming courses, please visit the Graduate Certificate Core Course List and the Elective Course List.