CEGU

How do great writers convey sense-of-place in their writing? What are the best ways to communicate scientific and social complexity in an engaging, accessible way? How can we combine academic rigor with journalistic verve and literary creativity to drive the public conversation about urgent environmental and urban issues? These are just some of the questions explored in WRITING THE CITY, an intensive course dedicated to honing our skills of verbal communication about issues related to the built and natural environments. Students will research, outline, draft, revise, and ultimately produce a well-crafted piece of journalistic writing for publication in the program's new annual magazine, Expositions. Throughout the quarter we will engage intensely with a range of authors of place-based writing exploring various literary and journalistic techniques, narrative devices, rhetorical ​approaches, and stylistic strategies.

Class and race are through lines in the determinative processes that transform urban space and inform conceptual models of urban growth and change. This lecture course examines historical geographies of class and race relations in crucial domains of urban life like employment, housing, public space and urgently during the contemporary era, climate change. The course emphasizes how Chicago-based models emerged as dominant frameworks purporting to make sense of urban morphology writ large, epitomized in publication of The City in 1925.

The Abrams Environmental Law Clinic attempts to solve some of the most pressing environmental and energy challenges throughout the Chicago area, the Great Lakes region, and the country. On behalf of a range of different clients, the clinic takes on entities which pollute illegally, fights for stricter permits, advocates for changes to regulations and laws, holds environmental and energy agencies accountable, and develops innovative approaches for improving the environment, public health, and the energy system.

Through clinic participation, students learn substantive environmental law and procedures for addressing concerns through the courts, administrative agencies, and legislative bodies. Students develop core advocacy competencies, such as spotting issues, conducting factual investigations, performing practical legal research, advocating through written and oral communications, planning cases, managing time, and addressing ethical issues and dilemmas. In addition, students develop an appreciation for the range of strategic and tactical approaches that effective advocates use. Enrollment is by application only. 

How environmental issues and challenges in the United States are addressed is subject to abrupt changes and reversals caused by extreme partisanship and the heightened significance of the issues for the health of the planet and all its inhabitants. The relatively brief history of this policy area, and the separate and distinct tracts in which public lands and pollution control issues are adjudicated, makes for a diverse and complex process by which humanity's impact on the natural world is managed and contained. This course focuses on how both types of environmental issues are addressed in each branch of the Federal government, the states and localities, as well as theories of how environmental issues arrived onto the public agenda and why attention to them is cyclical. Students are encouraged to understand the life cycle of public policy from its initial arrival on the public agenda to the passage of legislation to address adverse conditions, as well as how changes in the policy occur after the inevitable decline of intensive attention.

This course will investigate the foundational texts on environmental justice as well as case studies, both in and out of Chicago. Students will consider issues across a wide spectrum of concerns, including toxics, lead in water, waste management, and access to greenspaces, particularly in urban areas. These topics will be taught in accompaniment with a broader understanding of how social change occurs, what barriers exist to producing just outcomes, and what practices have worked to overcome obstacles in the past. The class will welcome speakers from a variety of backgrounds to address their work on these topics.

In the Fall 2024 Quarter, Students in Exhibiting the Environmental Humanities will have the opportunity to collaborate with the Sterling Morton Library at the Morton Arboretum to tell the story of May Theilgarrd Watts, an early environmental educator at the Arboretum, naturalist, author, and UChicago alumna.

Expositions Magazine is a quarterly publication on environmental change and the built environment—written, edited, designed, and produced by students. The goal of the publication is to communicate broadly and in an engaging, persuasive manner about important issues in the contemporary world. Since issues relating to the environment, geography, and urbanization almost invariably have spatial, visual, and expressive dimensions, the magazine showcases cartography, photography, illustration, and other modes alongside exceptional narrative and place-based writing. The primary goal of this practicum is to help students hone a broad range of analytic and representational tools associated with communicating complex issues to a general audience.

Weekly two-hour lab meetings provide collaborative work time for the three primary stages of publication—editing, design, and production—while bi-weekly one-hour seminar meetings introduce relevant technical skills, theoretical frameworks, and historical context. Through this diverse program, students will confront the wide range of questions and problems involved in publishing and design in the environmental social sciences and humanities. This course requires 3 quarters of enrollment for 100 credits.

This studio course, similar to a "senior seminar" in other disciplines, serves five purposes: (1) to allow students to pick up a few elements (drawings, models, collages, visual and place-based research, etc.) they've produced in other ARCH studio courses and spend more time refining them, outside the broader demands of a thematic studio class, (2) to acquaint students with advanced skills in expression and representation related to the revision and refinement of these elements, based on student interest and needs, (3) to assist students in the development of a portfolio of studio work, either toward application for graduate school or simply to have for themselves, and in systems to organize projects and revisions, (4) to add to students' typographic and graphic design skillsets, primarily using the Adobe Creative Suite, as part of the portfolio process, and (5) to practice and hone communication and writing skills related to discussing architectural projects. While there will be a modest set of skills-based exercises each week, to help structure the studio, most of the work for this class will be students' own project revisions and portfolios, and most of class time will be spent sharing and refining both.

Priority for this "senior studio" course will be given to third and fourth years who've taken at least two other ARCH studio classes already. Students who have not already taken "Skills & Processes for Architecture and Urban Design" may be asked to consult some of the problem sets from that class ahead of this one, to ensure a baseline upon which this class will build. Starting July 31, please visit arthistory.uchicago.edu/archconsent to request instructor consent for this class or other ARCH studios.

In this quarter, students will learn and practice methods to conduct a research project with a local environmental organization. Building on knowledge gained in the first half of this course, students will examine what makes a condition an environmental justice issue, how to conduct a literature review, how to develop and administer a questionnaire for key informant interviews, and how to access, understand, and utilize Census data. Students should expect to work in the community as well as the classroom, and in close collaboration with classmates. The class will conduct "deep-dive" research into the community selected, and will learn not only about the area, but techniques for how to do community-based research in a manner that acknowledges and appreciates the lived wisdom of the neighborhood's residents. The result will be a research report delivered to the community organization with students in the class listed as co-authors.

This course will use the Chicago region as the setting to evaluate the social, environmental, and economic effects of alternative forms of human settlement. Students will examine the history, theory and practice of designing cities in sustainable ways - i.e., human settlements that are socially just, economically viable, and environmentally sound. Students will explore the literature on sustainable urban design from a variety of perspectives, and then focus on how sustainability theories play out in the Chicago region. How can Chicago's neighborhoods be designed to promote environmental, social, and economic sustainability goals? This course is part of the College Course Cluster program: Urban Design.

This course explores how organizations-civic, private, governmental-working in the field of environmental advocacy construct, deploy and are shaped by distinct discourses governing relationships between nature and society. The environment is a field of social action in which organizations attempt to effect change in large domains like resource conservation, access, stewardship, and a basic right to environmental quality in everyday life. The work of effecting change in these complex domains can assume a variety of forms including public policy (through the agencies of the state), private enterprise (through the agency of the market), 'third sector' advocacy (through the agency of nonprofit organizations) and social activism (through the agency of social movements and community organizations). State, market, civil society and social movement organizations are where ideas are transmitted from theory to practice and back again in a recursive, dialectical process. These contrasting forms of organization have different histories, wellsprings and degrees of social power. Moreover, they bring different epistemologies to their claims about being legitimate custodians of nature-that is to say they can be understood genealogically. As such, organizations working to effect environment change are at once animated by and constitutive of distinct discourses governing the relationships between nature and society. The course explores how those distinct discourses are associated with a suite of different organizational realms of social action; the goal is trying to connect the dots between discursive formations and organizational forms.

Often considered a "City of Neighborhoods," Chicago has a fascinating network of community areas that were shaped by historical events and developments. Many of the city's neighborhoods include parks that have their own significant architectural, landscape and social histories. The class will introduce students to some of Chicago's most interesting historic neighborhoods and parks; expose them to key regional digital and on-site archives; and instruct them in appropriate methodologies for conducting deep research on sites and landscapes, with a special focus on Chicago's historic park system. Students will utilize an array of resources including Sanborn maps, US Census records, historic plans, photographs, and archival newspapers to provide in-depth studies of unpreserved sites. The course will also expose students to historic preservation policies, methodologies, and guidelines to provide practical strategies for preserving lesser-known places and sites. As a Chicago Studies class, its pedagogy will also include excursions into the city, engagement with local guest speakers, and research in relevant Chicago-area archives/special collections.

Expositions Magazine is a quarterly publication on environmental change and the built environment—written, edited, designed, and produced by students. The goal of the publication is to communicate broadly and in an engaging, persuasive manner about important issues in the contemporary world. Since issues relating to the environment, geography, and urbanization almost invariably have spatial, visual, and expressive dimensions, the magazine showcases cartography, photography, illustration, and other modes alongside exceptional narrative and place-based writing. The primary goal of this practicum is to help students hone a broad range of analytic and representational tools associated with communicating complex issues to a general audience.

Weekly two-hour lab meetings provide collaborative work time for the three primary stages of publication—editing, design, and production—while bi-weekly one-hour seminar meetings introduce relevant technical skills, theoretical frameworks, and historical context. Through this diverse program, students will confront the wide range of questions and problems involved in publishing and design in the environmental social sciences and humanities. This course requires 3 quarters of enrollment for 100 credits.

How do the movies shape our collective imagination about cities? Why do we so often turn to them for visions of disaster and dystopia, on the one hand, or a futuristic utopia on the other? How has film responded to cities in the past, and how can it help investigate our present urban condition? How can film be understood as a tool for exploring what a city is? In this seminar, we will watch and discuss feature films in which the built environment or urban issues play important roles. Students will improve their film literacy — learning not just what a film does but how it does it — and understand applications for film in the analysis of social, spatial, temporal, and immersive phenomena, as well as how it can help inspire and communicate design more effectively.

This course traces the economic, social, and physical development of the city in North America from pre-European times to the mid-twentieth century. We emphasize evolving regional urban systems, the changing spatial organization of people and land use in urban areas, and the developing distinctiveness of American urban landscapes. All-day Illinois field trip required. This course is part of the College Course Cluster, Urban Design.

Expositions Magazine is a quarterly publication on environmental change and the built environment—written, edited, designed, and produced by students. The goal of the publication is to communicate broadly and in an engaging, persuasive manner about important issues in the contemporary world. Since issues relating to the environment, geography, and urbanization almost invariably have spatial, visual, and expressive dimensions, the magazine showcases cartography, photography, illustration, and other modes alongside exceptional narrative and place-based writing. The primary goal of this practicum is to help students hone a broad range of analytic and representational tools associated with communicating complex issues to a general audience.

Weekly two-hour lab meetings provide collaborative work time for the three primary stages of publication—editing, design, and production—while bi-weekly one-hour seminar meetings introduce relevant technical skills, theoretical frameworks, and historical context. Through this diverse program, students will confront the wide range of questions and problems involved in publishing and design in the environmental social sciences and humanities. This course requires 3 quarters of enrollment for 100 credits.

Science fictional worlds are full of entities more familiar and perhaps less noticeable than the aliens that are often thought to typify the genre. Rock formations, plants, metallic seams, plastics, crystalline structures, nuclear waste and oozing seepages are among the entities that allow SF to form estranging questions about what it means to be in relation to others, what it means to live in and through an environment, and what it means to form relations of sustenance and communal possibility with those who do not or cannot return human care and recognition. Such questions about are urgent ones for thinking about climate catastrophe, capital, settler colonialism and endemic pandemics, as well as for thinking substantively about resistance and what life and livable worlds beyond the bleak horizons of the present could be. This class will engage science fiction (authors may include Ursula Le Guin, Vonda McIntyre, Kim Stanley Robinson, Nalo Hopkinson, Jeff Vandermeer and more) and environmental and social theory of various kind (authors may include Elizabeth Povinelli, Andreas Malm, Eduardo Kohn, James C. Scott, David Graeber, Jasper Bernes and more).