A Sense of Place
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course examines the places in which we work, travel, play, and dwell: the office tower and the suburban house, the city street and the superhighway, the small town and the megalopolis, the shopping mall and the theme park. Synthesizing insights from several fields, including cultural geography, urban studies, and architectural history, we explore such questions as: How do our values and worldview affect the way we experience places? How do places shape our attitudes and behavior? What are the qualities, both good and bad, of the places we inhabit, and what could we do to design and build better places? Readings may include J. B. Jackson's Landscape in Sight, James Kunstler's The Geography of Nowhere, Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place, and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities.
