Reading Cities, Sensing Cities

A Global Urban Humanities Interdisciplinary Colloquium

Fall 2014
City Planning 298 and Rhetoric 244a
CCN 13887
1 credit

Instructor: Susan Moffat (listed under instructors Jennifer Wolch and A.J. Cascardi)

Thursday, 1-2PM
106 Wurster Hall

This interdisciplinary colloquium will present speakers investigating cities and urbanism from multiple angles—through texts about cities, through looking at cities as texts, through art, photography, sound and music, performance, mapping, and crowdsourced sensing technologies. Speakers will include faculty and graduate students from departments including Architecture, Art History, Art Practice, City and Regional Planning, Comparative Literature, Geography, Theater, Dance and Performance Studies, and more.

The colloquium is part of the Global Urban Humanities Initiative, a joint project of the Arts & Humanities Division and the College of Environmental Design. Our aim with this speaker series is to provide a gathering place where people from different disciplines can learn about each other’s work on global cities.

Requirements for S/U credit: Attend at least 9 of 12 lectures including the December 4 wrap-up session and write two brief blogposts for the Global Urban Humanities blog. There are no required readings. However, relevant readings, videos, etc. will be posted here in advance of each lecture. All lectures are open to the campus community, and visitors are encouraged. Please view the course syllabus for more information.

Click on the lecture titles below for links to readings, videos, links, and speaker bios for each session.

August 28 - Art + Village + City in China | Margaret Crawford, Professor, Architecture

September 4 - Experiential Mapping of the Urban Form: Mission Possible: A Neighborhood Atlas and Intranational International Boulevard | Darin Jensen, Continuing Lecturer and Dept. Cartographer, Geography

September 11 - Representing Our Urban Diversity: Romare Bearden's Berkeley-The City and Its People (1973) | Lauren Kroiz, Assistant Professor, History of Art

September 18 - Reading Cities as a Blind Person | Chris Downey, Architect; Georgina Kleege, English

September 25 - Sensing San Leandro: Capturing Cityscapes through Sensors | Greg Niemeyer, Art Practice; Ron Rael, Architecture and Art Practice

October 2 - Experiments in Online and Print Journals on Cities

  • Urban Pilgrimage | Padma Maitland, Architecture and South and Southeast Asian Studies; Lawrence Yang, East Asian Languages and Cultures
  • Participatory Urbanisms | Karin Shankar, Performance Studies; Kirsten Larson, City and Regional Planning and Architecture 

October 9 - Uneven Modernity and the "Peripheral" City: Between Ethnography, History and Literature in Tbilisi | Harsha Ram, Associate Professor, Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature

October 16 - Creative Class Civil Wars: Displacement and the Arts in the Bay Area | Shannon Steen, Associate Professor, Theater, Dance & Performance Studies

October 23 - Urban Space, Spectacle, Memory and Music in Nineteenth-Century Vienna | Nicholas Mathew, Associate Professor, Music

October 30 - Nature, Culture, and Conflict at a Shoreline Landfill: The Albany Bulb | Susan Moffat, Project Director, Global Urban Humanities

November 6 - The Art of Change: Exploring Neighborhoods in Transition | Sue Mark, Artist, marksearch.org, Anisha Gade, MSArch candidate, UC Berkeley

November 13 - From 1904 Dublin to the Megacity: Public Access in Ulysses and Katarina Schröter's The Visitor | Catherine Flynn, Assistant Professor, English

November 20 - The Tokyo Model: Lessons in Slum Non-Clearance from the World's First "Megacity" | Jordan Sand, Professor, Japanese History and Culture, Georgetown University
NOTE: This talk will take place at 5PM.

November 27 - No class meeting

December 4 - Wrap-up Discussion--with food!

Any questions, please contact susanmoffat@berkeley.edu.