Global Urban Humanities/Future Histories Lab

Instructors: Ghigo di Tommaso (Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning), Erika Chong Shuch (Theater, Dance & Performance Studies), Susan Moffat (Global Urban Humanities Initiative)

Term: Spring 2018

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Why Read This Case Study?

This case study of the course Siteworks: Understanding Place through Design and Performance may be useful to teachers of urban studies, architecture, landscape architecture, design, theater, dance, and multiple humanities disciplines. This interdisciplinary research studio course combined landscape architecture methods including site analysis, mapping, graphic representation and oral presentation; performance methods including sensory immersion, embodied exercises, and engagement with an audience; and humanities methods including writing and interpretation.

This case study explains the steps of site analysis, research, and iteration that led to the creation of a site-based performance that aimed to share the students’ undertanding of the site with an invited audience.

It describes the ways that three instructors from the fields of performance, landscape architecture, and urban planning team-taught a course with undergraduates from majors including architecture, computer science, development studies, and political science.

The conclusions of the case study include:

• Place-based, project-based learning encourages students to road-test concepts in a concrete fashion that may have greater staying power than book learning alone.

• Fieldwork can be useful in arts and humanities education.

• Design students benefit from exercises that deepen awareness of social factors.

• Collaborative, hands-on projects provide training in teamwork and time management for students and graduate teaching assistants that is useful both inside and outside academia.

• Writing exercises associated with project- based learning produce critical thinking of a quality that might not have been achieved without the place-based, hands-on work.