Global Urban Humanities/Future Histories Lab

A Year on Angel Island: A Project of Future Histories Lab and Berkeley Arts+Design---9-minute documentary

A Year on Angel Island: A Project of Future Histories Lab and Berkeley Arts+Design--90-second trailer

Angel Island Oratorio | Performance by Huang Ruo, conducted by Wei Cheng, and performed by the Berkeley Chamber Chorus and the Del Sol Quartet (Winter 2022)

Performance excerpts, 3 min; This December 3, 2022 performance of Huang Ruo’s Angel Island Oratorio at Hertz Hall, UC Berkeley, was one of two performances that were the centerpieces of a year of curriculum and public programming about immigration and incarceration called A Year on Angel Island. Along with the February 23-26, 2023 performances of Within These Walls, by Lenora Lee Dance, this oratorio for voices and strings provided UC Berkeley students a chance to perform meaningful works of art as a way to explore challenging topics.

From 1910 to 1940, the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay processed hundreds of thousands of immigrants from more than 80 countries, most from Asia.  Its administration and detention facilities were built in order to enforce the Chinese Exclusion Act and other discriminatory laws. Today it is a National Historic Landmark located within the Angel Island State Park.

A Year on Angel Island was a project of the UC Berkeley Future Histories Lab and Berkeley Arts+Design and was supported by the Mellon Foundation. Co-directors of the project were Susan Moffat and Lisa Wymore.

The Angel Island Oratorio was commissioned by the Del Sol Quartet with the support of the Hewlett Foundation. It premiered inside the Detention Barracks at the Angel Island Immigration Station in 2021. The 2022 UC Berkeley production was created by:

Huang Ruo, composer

Wei Cheng, music director

Olivia Ting, visual designer

Ky Frances, choreographer

Mia Chong, choreographer

The Del Sol Quartet: Kathryn Bates, Benjamin Kreith, Charlton Lee, and Sam Weiser.

Instructors: Anna Livia Brand, Bryan Wagner

Term: Spring 2019

Course #: Landscape Architecture 154 / American Studies 102

Why Read This Case Study?

New Orleans: Historical Memory and Urban Design, an interdisciplinary research studio, focused on the ways human history and urban design interact over time. Faculty members Anna Livia Brand (Landscape Architecture) and Bryan Wagner (English) led this undergraduate course, which posed fundamental questions: how are cities designed, and how are such designs reshaped over time – benefiting some residents and neighborhoods while imposing lasting harm on others? How can these multilayered histories be peeled back, allowing the roots of violence and injustice to be revealed and contested? And how might place-based resistance strategies reclaim the past and portend the future?

This course took students from a variety of academic majors on a journey through the history of New Orleans’ Black communities. They tracked the progressive marginalization, displacement, and gentrification of these communities, and traveled to the city to explore and learn from local residents and organizations firsthand. Brand and Wagner challenged students to harness their imaginations and creativity to reimagine place-based strategies of resistance and design a map to guide residents and visitors to important cultural events. The studio partnered with the New Orleans Paper Monuments project to create public poster art about sites of deep meaning to the community, featuring individuals, social movements, and historical events that shaped the city’s social geography and landscape. Then, students developed a digital interactive map of Claiborne Avenue, a main throughway through the city’s Black community, locating important sites of resistance and cultural regeneration – historical places, public art, cultural events, and street performances.

In this case study, readers are introduced to the semester-long studio’s structure and pedagogical objectives, can view a rich sample of student creative work, and gain insight into the student experience via a set of reflective essays.

Instructor: Walter Hood

Term: Spring 2016

Course #: Landscape Architecture 203 / City Planning 243

Why Read This Case Study?

Museums are among the most important urban institutions – repositories of art, culture, and history; educational opportunities; spaces of community dialogue; and hubs of community life. Many graduate students are alert to the role of museums, seek to learn more, and are eager to work with – and learn from – museums, as partners in their explorations.

In this graduate research studio, Museum and the City, led by landscape architects Walter Hood and Marcus Owens, students from a variety of disciplines including architecture, landscape architecture, city planning, art practice, and performance studies, worked with the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) on engaging the community in the life of the museum.

Students studied the origins of OMCA, rooted in Oakland’s Black Power movement and civil rights struggles of the 1960s, and its physical manifestation on the shores of the city’s Lake Merritt. With dedicated studio space, student teams explored OMCA’s Brutalist architecture and modernist landscape, studied historical maps, and used visualization – formal design exercises, photography, community mapping, exhibit design – to understand the museum’s relation to the city and adjacent neighborhoods. This studio-based pedagogy, unfamiliar to some of the students, exposed them to a learning model based on teamwork, frequent iteration of ideas and interim work products, and continuous feedback from instructors, fellow students, and OMCA partners. They used new-found design and presentation skills to fabricate interactive installations exhibited on-site at the museum’s popular Friday Night at OMCA.

Instructor: Melody Chang

Term: Fall 2021

Course #: CYPLAN 198 & 290, RHE 198 & 295

The gaduliya lohar are the traditional travelling blacksmiths of southeastern Rajasthan, who identify their ancestry as weapon makers of the Rajput rulers of Mewad at Chittorgarh. When Mogul king Akbar invaded the fort, they escaped, and ashamed at the failure of their weapons, vowed never to return to Chittorgarh until Mewad was restored. This identity has carried forward to the present, and still defines them as a community.  Throughout their history, they have travelled from village to village, repairing and selling farm and household tools. As cities have expanded and industrialized implements have taken the market, the competition is stiff and work has dwindled. But the draw of the city remains, and many lohar have set up camp in the city, for longer periods and with fewer caravan accoutrements, because ox carts are bulky and urban oxen are expensive to maintain. Yet they remain squatters, treated as outsiders wherever they are, because they are permanently camping, just temporary residents.

Although the South Indian city of Kanchipuram is popularly known as the City of One Thousand Temples, there is no existing prescribed circuit, and no comprehensive temple listing or map to guide visitors.* Rather, the thousands of pilgrims who flood the city daily usually only know about the five most famous temples. Scattered street signs throughout the busy city point the way to these sprawling monuments, which are always crowded and especially thronged at festival times (Figure 1). However, other pilgrims arrive seeking particular temples.

West Nepal provides a unique space to think about pilgrimage in the past. For many centuries, this central Himalayan region lay at the fringes of neighboring states. During the 13th century CE, the Khasa Malla dynasty established a kingdom here with seasonal capitals at Sinja and Dullu, which soon grew to encompass the entire region as well as parts of India and Tibet (Adhikary 1997; Pandey 1997) (Figure 1). With these developments, the region became a key zone of interaction. Capitalizing on pre-existing routes and connections, it connected India to the Silk Road.

Location: David Brower Center, 2150 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA

Date: 4/17/2019 - 4/18/2019

An interdisciplinary symposium on monuments, memorialization, and public space. 

Location: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA

Date/Time: 11/21/2014, 1:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.

The Public Art/Housing Publics: Conversations on Art and Social Justice Symposium explored innovative collaborations across cultural and social justice sectors. How can we sustain affordable housing and healthy neighborhoods in our communities? How can we sustain a thriving artistic life for our citizens? Most importantly, how can we answer both of these questions together? Timed to coincide with the residency of UC-Berkeley Regents Lecturer, Rick Lowe of Project Row Houses, participants included artists, scholars, civic organizers, and affordable housing developers from around the Bay Area.

Location: Wurster Gallery (121 Wurster Hall),Berkeley, CA 94720

Date/Time: 10/08/2018, 8:30 am-12 pm

On June 11, 2014, participants in the UC Berkeley Global Humanities Initiative and the UCLA Urban Humanities Initiative gathered at UCLA’s Perloff Hall to review student projects and reflect on teaching and learning experiences at a symposium called “Anxieties of Interdisciplinarity: Projects in the Urban Humanities.” These are two among of a growing number of initiatives funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in its Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities program, and the UCLA-UC Berkeley teams are meeting for joint symposia about twice a year to share notes and exchange ideas.

Teatro Campesino | Kinan Valdez (Spring 2016)

Documentary, 1 minute; Part of the Spring 2016 Mexico City: Materiality Performance and Power Studio Course.

Click the title and scroll to the gray box below to access the video.

Instructors: C. Greig Crysler, Angel Marino, and Maria Moreno Carranco.

In a narrow, high-sided concrete courtyard hidden in an outdoor corner of the Brutalist Wurster Hall, Kinan Valdez of Teatro Campesino asked students and faculty to growl and shout; to walk, crawl, and leap; and to engage with props such as ropes and lampshades to reconsider the uses of discarded objects. The “Theater of the Sphere” practice of Teatro Campesino grows out of the company’s roots in Cesar Chavez’ United Farmworkers Union. In the 1960s, Teatro Campesino performed and engaged with workers on flatbed trucks and in union halls, and the company continues to create innovate theater today.

Assistant Professor Angela Marino (Theater, Dance & Performance Studies) had invited Valdez to help prepare students for a research studio trip to Mexico City, where they will investigate issues of materiality, performance and power in a fast-changing megacity. During the workshop, we were struck by how our individual and collaborative motion in the confined gray courtyard transformed a prison-like space of raw concrete into an almost cozy enclave, a home for shared experiments in how bodies relate to architectural space.

In March, the students will travel to Mexico City to pursue research projects ranging from the ethnographic to the artistic, led by Marino, Assoc. Prof. C. Greig Crysler (Architecture), and Prof. Maria Moreno Carranco of the Universidad Autonoma Metoropolitana-Cuajimalpa. As with all Global Urban Humanities courses, the group is interdisciplinary and includes students from disciplines including architecture, art practice, film, geography, literature and performance studies.

A Year on Angel Island: A Project of Future Histories Lab and Berkeley Arts+Design---9-minute documentary

A Year on Angel Island: A Project of Future Histories Lab and Berkeley Arts+Design--90-second trailer

On October 9, 2014, Harsha Ram (Comparative Literature and Slavic Languages and Literature) discussed his research exploring what happens to (historical) modernity and (literary/cultural) modernism in Tiflis (Tbilisi), Georgia, a city remote from the great metropolitan centers of Europe and the West.

This talk was part of the Reading Cities, Sensing Cities colloquium presented by the Global Urban Humanities Initiative at UC Berkeley.

Zephyr Frank, of Stanford University's Spatial History Project, notes that maps can be seductive, and offers two provocative statements: maps do not have to be beautiful; and ""we should make fewer maps."" As Frank notes, ""maps are not an end point but a means to new thoughts and problems."" Eve Blau, from Harvard's Graduate School of Design, discusses the use of historical maps as a research tool, focusing on examples from Central Europe. "Architecture defined built space.... [but] what you see is not necessarily what is there; if something looks like something, it does not always operate as you expect." UCLA's Diane Favro provides a response to both speakers.

Session One- The Geohumanities Project: What Worked, What Didn’t?

Featuring a group of visiting scholars who labored successfully to produce a transdisciplinary volume entitled GeoHumanities: Art, History, Text at the Edge of Place. The editors reflect on what worked, what didn’t, and what lessons came out of the project

-Jennifer Wolch, Dean, College of Environmental Design-Jim Ketchum, Island Press, Washington DC-Sarah Luria, English, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA-Doug Richardson, Association of American Geographers, Washington DC