Global Urban Humanities/Future Histories Lab

Instructor: Lok Siu

Term: Spring 2023

Course #: ASAMST 190 / HUM C132 / ENVDES C132

Why Read This Case Study?

Students in “A Radical History of SF Chinatown: Designing a Digital Tour” worked with two community partners to dig deeply into the rich history of this thriving district in San Francisco and share it with a public audience.

Project-based learning provides opportunities for students to deepen their research and improve a variety of skills. By preparing a public-facing website, students took responsibility for undertaking research in which accuracy is consequential; for creating writing that is clear and compelling; and for creating visuals that are meaningful and effective in conveying information.

Students created an interactive map of meaningful locations in Chinatown, giving visitors to the website access to an array of articles they wrote on themes including culture, education, housing, public health and public space.

This case study provides an overview of the arc of the semester that allowed students to both conduct research produce a website. It will be useful to instructors in history, ethnic studies, and other disciplines who wish to experiment with project-based learning and public-facing work.

Instructor: Lincoln Cushing

Term: Summer 2022

Course #: HUM C132 / ENVDES C132

Why Read This Case Study?

Undergraduates often do not carry out independent archival research until they take upper-division courses, if at all. What would be the impact of introducing incoming freshmen, particularly students who are the first in their families to attend college, to the joys and challenges of handling archival documents?

In Archiving as Social Justice Practice, professional archivist Lincoln Cushing taught students not just to use archives but to help create them. Following field trips to the storied archives of the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley as well as to community-based archives, students helped process materials that became part of the Freedom Archives, a long-established grassroots archive in Berkeley. They handled, selected, and digitized historic protest posters and attached metadata, learning important concepts about the practice of history in the process.

The course was supported by Future Histories Lab and offered as part of the Summer Bridge program, which welcomes students from diverse backgrounds, including students of color, low-income, and first-generation students to the college experience in the summer before their freshman fall semester. In their reflections offered in this case study, students said the experience changed the course of their undergraduate careers.

Students who were not even sure they were allowed inside the Bancroft gained the confidence to feel that university resources were theirs. STEM-oriented students gained an understanding of the importance of the humanities; humanities students began to understand history as a discipline; and students oriented toward activism connected their concerns for the future with an appreciation for the need to understand the past.

Instructor: Jennifer Wolch

Term: Spring 2022

Course #: CYP 291

Why Read This Case Study?

Many graduate students are keenly  interested in urban communities, but many of them miss the opportunity to work directly with community-based partners and/or learn as part of a team working in a studio-based setting. 

In this graduate research studio, Buzz  Studio: Planning Equitable Cities for People and Pollinators, led by urban planner and geographer Jennifer Wolch and botanist and landscape architect Maria Fernandez Gonzalez, students from a variety of disciplines worked with Friends of Peralta Hacienda Historical Park (PHHP), located in  Oakland’s Fruitvale District, on making the neighborhood greener and more pollinator-friendly.  

Students studied the research literature on pollinators – bees, birds, butterflies, bats, and many more – and how to design urban neighborhoods to support them. They also delved into indigenous, colonial, and contemporary social  and landscape history of Oakland, the Fruitvale District, and Peralta Hacienda Park itself. Looking to the future, students also proposed a walking tour; designs to make Fruitvale more pollinator friendly; and pollinator-centric curricula for local schools and PHHP’s youth  education programs. 

Enjoying dedicated studio space, student teams studied historical as well as contemporary maps and plans, and pinned up maps and schematic designs for critique by instructors, students, and visiting experts. This studio-based pedagogy, unfamiliar to many students, exposed them to a learning model based on teamwork, frequent iteration of ideas and interim work products, and continuous feedback from PHHP leadership as well as instructors and  fellow students. 

One of the last research studios in the Global Urban Humanities/Future Histories Lab, Buzz Studio challenged students from diverse disciplines to not only study the city but also to propose strategies in the context of a lively community-university partnership.

Instructor: Melody Chang

Term: Fall 2021

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

Instructor: Pablo Gonzalez

Term: Summer 2021

Course #: HUM 132AC / ENV DES 132AC / ETHSTD 190AC

Why read this case study?

How can new technologies encourage students to observe, research, analyze, and share knowledge about urban environments? Can mapping public protest art and creating augmented reality projects and podcasts inspire students to ask deep questions about power, race, and privilege in urban neighborhoods?

In the wake of protests following the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, thousands of people gathered in overwhelmingly peaceful protests in Oakland, as across the country. Fearing unrest, many building owners in commercial districts covered ground-floor storefront windows with plywood.

Local artists used this plywood as canvases to express their outrage and resistance to racism and state violence. These temporary murals were important records of a historic moment when the Black Lives Matter movement gained new visibility.

However, within a year, many of the murals had been whitewashed or the plywood they were on was removed.

In order to preserve the meaning and memory of this protest art, students in Dr. Pablo Gonzalez’ Summer 2021 course Public Art and Social Justice: Mapping Mural Art and Narratives used photographs of these ephemeral murals to create a virtual public gallery of this important art. The students in this class, which was supported by Future Histories Lab (part of the Global Urban Humanities Initiative) mapped the art and created augmented reality projects that allowed people visiting the storefronts to use their smartphones to see images of the murals that had been removed.

The students also tracked down and interviewed a number of the artists and created podcasts and audio clips for the augmented reality project that convey the artists’ intentions to future generations.

The gallery, augmented reality projects, and podcasts can be accessed through links in this case study.

Instructor: Greg Castillo, Scott Saul

Term: Spring 2020

Course #: American Studies 102 / Environmental Design 109

Why Read This Case Study?

Cities of the East Bay, such as Oakland and Berkeley, were well-known as centers of political, social, and cultural activist in the 1960s. But less well known is the fact that the East Bay continued to be a site of radical movements throughout 1970s.

The undergraduate studio, East Bay Revolution, was led by Professor of English Scott Saul and Professor of Architecture Greg Castillo, both experts on local social, political, and countercultural movements in the Bay Area and beyond. They immersed students in archival place-based research related to the history of East Bay activism of the 1960s and 1970s. These students came from diverse fields of study - American Studies, Urban Studies, History, Music, Architecture, Geography, Art Practice, and Conservation and Resource Studies.

Drawing on rich community-based archives in Berkeley, Emeryville, and Oakland, as well as archival materials from institutional archives such as Berkeley’s Public Library, students worked together in teams to undertake archival story-telling projects. These projects focused on particular social, cultural, and design movements that gained traction and altered the political consciousness of the Bay Area and beyond. The students began their work in a studio setting, but when the COVID-19 pandemic shifted in-person instruction and studio work online, students adjusted quickly. Learning from each other as well as their professors, students gained expertise in a range of methods: how to analyze print, audio, and visual archives; contextualize archival materials by drawing on other historical sources; and build digital archives. With remarkable creativity, and unwavering determination to track down ephemeral historical materials, they produced powerful multimedia stories about the East Bay’s mid-20th century activist movements.

Instructors: Lauren Kroiz, Andrew Shanken

Term: Spring 2020

Course #: ARCH 209 / HISTART 290

Why Read This Case Study?

How do cities use the urban public landscape to preserve, represent, and memorialize their histories? 

Nowhere is the “memory industry” that shapes the design of memorial landscapes more powerful and pervasive than in Berlin. This studio focused on the complex links between Berlin’s post-reunification urban renewal program designed to jump-start the city’s urban economy, and efforts to create an urban public landscape commemorating violent histories, collective trauma, and reconciliation. The studio used the lens of memory studies to trace Berlin’s uneasy efforts to attract foreign investment and tourists on the one hand, and create a ‘guilt’ environment marked by the preservation and memorialization of urban sites linked to the Holocaust, colonialism, and the Cold War.

Led by architectural historian Andrew Shanken and art historian Lauren Kroiz, students were challenged to rethink memory and commemoration in Berlin. Synthesizing graphic methods drawn from architecture, landscape architecture, art practice, and urban planning with literary, art historical, cinematic, historical, and geographical analysis, they worked collaboratively to propose site-specific revisions to Berlin’s memorial environment. The studio produced urban and architectural proposals; scholarly, literary and photographic essays; graphic novels; films; and sound pieces. The final project was an imaginative and provocative guide to the “guilt environment” of Berlin, highlighting commemorative interventions as architecture and design, but also as rhetoric, territory, and dynamic parts of everyday urban life.

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: Laura Belik

Term: Fall 2018

Course #: Laura Belik

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

Course #: 

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.