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: 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.

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.

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.

Art + Village + City in the Pearl River Delta is a publication produced by the Global Urban Humanities Research Studio, University of California, Berkeley.

Supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the Global Urban Humanities Initiative at University of California, Berkeley.

This exhibition is the product of a research studio focusing on the interactions between art, villages and cities in China’s Pearl River Delta. It is the second in a series of three research studios sponsored by the Global Urban Humanities Initiative at UC Berkeley. Supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the project is a collaboration between the College of Environmental Design and the Arts & Humanities division of the College of Letters and Sciences. Initiated and co-taught by Margaret Crawford (Architecture) and Winnie Wong (Rhetoric) during the spring semester of 2015, the studio critically investigated a wide range of urban art villages in the Pearl River Delta, exploring their historical development, current state, and future potential. These sites ranged from Dafen Oil Painting Village in Shenzhen, which exports hundreds of thousands of trade paintings around the world, to Xiaozhou Village in Guangzhou, where local artists and art teachers transformed village houses into studios and galleries, and to the collaborative architectural project of Japanese architect Fujimoto and Vitamin Creative Space in Guangzhou. During a spring break trip through the region, students documented and analyzed the ways in which villagers, artists, officials, migrants, developers and entrepreneurs leverage art practices in order to reimagine urban life and urban citizenship. Students and faculty then spent the summer transforming these research materials into an exhibition. The exhibition aims to communicate complex narratives without being reductive and to convey the physical reality of our sites through multiple media including video, dioramas, largescale maps, models, ephemera and objects.

Instructors: Margaret Crawford (Architecture) and Winnie Wong (Rhetoric)

GSI: Abingo Wu

Term: Spring 2015

Course #: Architecture 209 / Rhetoric 250

Why Read This Case Study?

South China’s Pearl River Delta has long been home to thriving ‘art villages’ – quasi-autonomous local jurisdictions that control their own land – whose economies are anchored by practicing artists producing replica oil paintings for sale around the world. Although the expanding metropolitan Shanghai has enveloped these villages over time, they have maintained their identities and economies based on art reproduction and global markets sales. 

The graduate research studio, Art+Village+City, was led by Professor of Architecture Margaret Crawford and Professor of Rhetoric and History of Art Winnie Wong. The studio included students from a variety of disciplines including anthropology, Asian and East Asian studies, art history, art practice, architecture, city planning and landscape architecture. Students thus came to the course with a wide range of expertise and theoretical perspectives, creating an ideal environment for learning across disciplines. 

Using a range of research methods, the studio examined the historical development of art villages, their current political and economic circumstances, and how their arts-based village economies have shaped the local cultures and built environments over time. Students delved into the history and social organization of art villages, screened interviews with artists from art villages held by the Asia Art Archive, and produced videos of a local Chinese site, East Pacific Mall in Oakland. They were introduced to ethnographic methods and the use of photography in field work. Students then spent two weeks traveling to Hong Kong, and then into the Pearl River Delta, exploring such urban art villages as Dafen, Baishizhou, and Xiaozhou, as well as experimental art spaces Vitamin Creative Space and Handshake 302. Returning to Berkeley, they worked with SHIMURAbros (as researchers at Studio Olafur Eliasson), Sascha Pohle, Jing Wen, and José Figueroa to create an outstanding exhibit in Bauer-Wurster Gallery which then traveled to Shanghai.