URBAN IMAGINARIES

Curriculum: Urban Elective Seminar, California College of the Arts, Architecture Division
Date: Spring 2020 and 2021 
Professor: Janette Kim

This seminar offers a critical introduction to major theories of urbanism to ask how architects can engage with the social movements and political forces that shape contemporary cities. We will learn how collective cultural narratives about the city—or urban imaginaries—that were long driven by settlement, industrialization, and modernization are now being challenged by social inequity, climate change, and neoliberalism today. To understand where there is room to redirect these driving forces, we will explore how such narratives have been redirected by rhetoric, representation, material forces, social acts, political directives, and market exchanges. 

We will focus on four themes and spend three weeks on each to unpack its historic contexts and counter-narratives. Property will reveal how land has been parceled, zoned, and reconfigured to create wealth and opportunity, from the Jeffersonian Grid to what Rem Koolhaas has called the culture of congestion. Equity will review systems of racial and class discrimination, from red-lining and Urban Renewal to contemporary trends in housing policy and gentrification. Environment will explore the social justice implications of natural resource use, ecosystem maintenance, and climate risk. Lastly, Economy will examine how cities enable the distribution and consumption of capital by studying real estate development, neoliberal planning, labor, and work. 

2020
Students in this seminar created a book Designing a Just City: How architecture reshapes property, equity, ecology, and economy. See Full Digital Copy | Order a physical copy 

This book reveals architectural and urban design strategies for influencing politics, urban economics, and social action. It studies built and unbuilt projects to locate a shared language through which designers, politicians, activists, developers, and others can come together and open up more probing questions. This book is both critical and cautiously optimistic. It is critical of the way both avant-garde Utopias and ‘best practices’ handbooks make assumptions about what progress looks like. Instead, we aim to unpack more deep-seated and open-ended ways to shape social justice in cities today.

This book was edited by Janette Kim and created by students at the California College of Arts Architecture Division: Alhakam Alaedh, James Ayling, Pietro Carini, Celdin Fajardo, Shih Ting Huang, Jennifer Jimenez, Thomas Krulevitch, Lori Martinez, Donna Mena, Kurt Pelzer, Sharan Saboji, Sayer Al Sayer, Jose Trujillo, and Elmer Wang.  

2021 
Students in the second iteration of this seminar created expansions to Designing a Just City focused on bridging between architectural techniques and actions (defined as activist initiatives or urban policies). Previews of this work can be seen here and above. 

We also conducted interviews with Marquita Price, Director of Urban and Regional Planning at the East Oakland Collective (video link), and Gregory Jackson, Cofounder of Repaired Nations and Equal Justice Works Fellow at the Sustainable Economies Law Center (video link). These events were co-hosted by CCA@CCA, E-School, and Urban Works Agency at the California College of the Art. This event is funded by an endowment gift to support The Deborah and Kenneth Novack Creative Citizens Series at CCA, an annual series of public programs focused on creative activism.