The course covers concepts and methods of sustainable urbanism, livable cities, resiliency, and smart growth principles from a social, environmental, and economic perspective.

In this course we examine how the development in and of cities – in the US and around the world – can be sustainable, especially given predictions of a future characterized by increasing environmental and social volatility. We begin by critiquing definitions of sustainability. The fundamental orientation of the course will be understanding cities as complex socio-natural systems, and so we will look at approaches to sustainability grouped around several of the most important component systems: climate, energy, transportation, and water. With the understanding that sustainability has no meaning if it excludes human life, perspectives from both the social sciences and humanities are woven throughout: stewardship and environmental ethics are as important as technological solutions and policy measures.

This discussion-based course will introduce students to both classical and recent scholarship in Pacific World historiography. By adopting micro-historical, comparative, and transnational methods, students will examine the formation of three overlapping “worlds”: The Antipodes, Polynesia, and the northeastern Pacific. Analyzing the myriad intersections of race, gender, health, and the environment, we will explore a range of large-scale historical processes that shaped and reshaped the Pacific between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. These processes include European exploration, settler colonialism, and indigenous sovereignty; sex, depopulation, and race science; labor, migration, and urbanization; industrialization and environmental exploitation; and imperial expansion and citizenship. The course is intended for students with an interest in the Pacific Islands, Australasia, and the North American West, as well as those interested in race, gender, health, or the environment within indigenous, immigrant, or settler colonial contexts. Required readings—which will consist of book chapters and academic articles—will be used to contextualize and critically analyze a variety of primary sources during each class session.

This course can be taken as an ENST Capstone.

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.

The goal of this survey course is to analyze the impact of the human enterprise on the world that sustains it. Topics include human population dynamics and historical trends in global impact, with most of the course focusing on how humans have altered the Earth system through a variety of processes (including climate change, air, water, nutrient cycling, pollution/novel entities, biodiversity, and land use). We read and discuss diverse sources, write short analytical papers, and a final argument based research paper.

Politics determines not only what particular faction holds power, but the parameters upon which contests for power are conducted. Competing political factions may diverge in the details of the policies they favor but may agree on a central organizing principle upon which their policy differences are contested. This course acknowledges that such principles exist and structure politics, economics, and social arrangements, but also challenges the notion that these are immutable, and argues that other principles could be substituted which would drastically change these arrangements. The course introduces students to alternative theories of economics, politics, and environmental policy that challenge mainstream notions of what is acceptable under the current structural and institutional constraints, including how the retreat to notions of realism and practicality place limits on changes necessary to preserve and protect the natural environment.

Environmental issues have become a prominent part of the work of international organizations and their member nations. However, the resolution to issues and concerns shared in common by the nations of the world often faces obstacles based on access to wealth and resources, political and military power, and the demands of international economic institutions. While multinational agreements have been achieved and successfully implemented, resolutions to issues such as climate change have been harder to achieve. The course will look at the origins of international cooperation on environmental issues, several case studies of issues upon which the international community has attempted to bring about cooperative solutions (climate change, the ozone hole, climate refugees, etc.), and the work that regional associations of nations have done to jointly address shared environmental challenges. In addition, speakers from various consulates have addressed the class to discuss environmental policymaking in their countries.

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 can be taken as an ENST Capstone.

The city continually erases itself, replacing the spaces, architectures, objects and activities that resonate in the memory of its inhabitants. While this process is the consequence of familiar forces — capitalist development, socio-cultural changes, environmental responses — the phenomenon of perpetual erasure sometimes produces a form of collective amnesia, interfering with our ability to reconcile with our pasts, especially histories of systemic displacement, exclusion, and exploitation. This course, a hybrid of a seminar and studio, will examine the deep cultural and urbanistic implications of Chicago’s Bronzeville. Via poetry, fiction, history, testimony, interviews, photography,and films, students will recover Bronzeville’s layered history and contemporary implications. In the studio, students will develop drawings to connect these narratives so space and time. Via site visits and conversations, this course will connect with artists, architects and researchers currently completing projects within and adjacent to this area of the city.

In this architecture studio course, you will learn and practice a range of architectural skills, using as a starting point the library as an institution, and in particular the range of libraries in and around Chicago. You will look at, sketch, and work within libraries across the campus and city, and think about the role the library plays in our time. Studio projects will focus on the library as a locus for learning, a public space, an organizational system, a set of social services, and an architectural opportunity. After a series of short design exercises, you will work in groups to design a proposal for a new library for Chicago, on a real site that you choose. The bulk of your time will be spent on these studio projects, but there will also be reading and conversation. Materials for drawing and making will be provided.

Note: this class will not have field trips outside of class time, but will regularly meet at different locations both on-campus and around the city. Please make sure you’ve built enough time into your schedule to get to and from meeting locations. No prior experience necessary. Consent required for all studio courses not as a barrier to entry, but to ensure fit. Please contact Luke Joyner (lukejoy@uchicago.edu↗) for more info.

In a world of settler property regimes, corporate holdings, and national parks, how are communities reclaiming the lands they’ve lost? National parks overturned; indigenous community conservation areas established; food deserts restored with expanding networks of community gardens: the last decade has seen an eruption of opportunities for land justice amidst continuing challenges from ongoing processes of capitalism, colonialism, and climate change. This course offers a wholistic anthropological approach to land justice activism that begins with strategies for building collaborations, before looking at tools to help assert claims over territories and resources, and finally, exploring ways of restoring reclaimed lands with new foodways, forests, and community governance. Alongside critical readings and guest teachings from land justice activists in Southeast Asia and North America, the course will examine how a diversity of citizen science tools are being combined with indigenous, anthropological, geographic, and ecological methods to formulate a toolkit for land justice activism and community land/resource management. From counter mapping territory with remote sensing to effective strategies used to block mining projects; from indigenous conservation planning to guerrilla gardening: this course will explore different approaches to reclaiming lands and resources.