ENVI 260, "Design and Environmental Justice," and ENVI 316, "Governing Cities by Design," taught by Giuseppina Forte, have students produce design projects. The classes satisfy the foundational Culture / Humanities block for the major and count as electives in Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences for both the major and the concentration.
2023-24 Art Show
ENVI 260 / ARTS 261
Design and Environmental Justice
This seminar/digital art studio offers key literature to examine the relationship between design and environmental justice. It will help build a vocabulary to study the environment as disputed terrain between technological fixes and issues of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and colonial status. Students will develop textual/graphic projects about a chosen case study aiming to reorient public perception and imagination around environmental justice. Case studies include contemporary issues like “natural” disasters, eco-cities, and urbanization in the Global South and North. Skills taught include design-thinking and collaborative design, digital art (Photoshop), and participation in collective reviews and public presentations. The class culminates in a presentation to external reviewers and a final exhibition.
This seminar/digital art studio examines the interrelationship between design and environmental justice from an intersectional perspective. It encourages students to develop a critical understanding of the role that technical rationality, devoid of ethics and respect for difference, plays in producing racist, heteropatriarchal, and ecocidal forms of oppression. In parallel, we will explore place-based practices that counter neoliberal and extractivist approaches to the (built) environment.
ENVI 316 / ARTS 316
Governing Cities by Design: the Built Environment as a Technology of Space
Like in the classic era, cities of the 19th century were metaphors for government: good government could not exist without good governance of the city. This creative seminar charts the transformation of the built environment (architecture and urbanism) as a technology of space to govern cities and citizens from the mid-19th century until the present. Through debates and case studies across geographies and historical timeframes, we will analyze how regimes of government shape and are shaped by the built environment. The seminar has a studio component that consists of an urban project where students will apply theories and approaches to a real case study using digital art (2D and 3D modeling).
Using theoretical perspectives from urban studies, this seminar/workshop explores how the built environment, as a technology of space, contributes to the production of difference, the establishment of certain regimes of power, and the erasure of specific urban histories--mainly those of underrepresented groups. Students will engage in multimedia place-based projects to imagine and create more equitable built environments.
