Course Syllabus
Making Room: Climate Crisis = Housing Crisis
Housing is essential to human life and a human right. The design, configuration, location and cost of housing profoundly influences the health and wealth of all people. This course introduces students to an enormous challenge facing practitioners: how to house a growing population in a turbulent environment. Throughout the semester, we will investigate the stresses of environmental flux and the tools of climate response through the lens of housing need. We will reflect upon the tensions of two interrelated crises that are often treated separately. Given the urgent need for action, we will employ Marshall Gans’s framework for public narratives: Self, Us, Now to connect our design and policy explorations to an argument for transformation.
We will use a combination of case studies from the field of practice as well as readings in policy, social science, and real estate. We will familiarize ourselves with the economic and ecological forces that imperil the safety and stability of residential communities as well as a variety of adaptation interventions. Our considerations will include issues of tenure, “managed retreat”, infrastructure and forms of ecological and social regeneration. From issues of regulation: flood maps, and building code, socio-economic tools, and financial implements. We will focus on the assumptions and decisions in climate policy that may reinforce or replicate conditions of housing vulnerability. Therefore, we will pay special attention to spatial injustices such as racial segregation and economic inequality which shape exposure to climate risk and housing insecurity. Our discussion will center marginalized voices, including low-income, indigenous, and communities of color and the multi-generational implications of insecurity and forced migration.
Although my professional experience is rooted in North America, students are encouraged to bring into the classroom experiences, interests, and challenges rooted in other geographies.
Course Requirements:
We will use the class’s lived experiences to frame our exploration of the social, economic, political, and environmental forces that shape the location, design, and form of housing. Our perspective will be multi-scalar: starting from a single home, to a neighborhood, to the region. Each student will develop their own housing narrative. The class will then work in small teams to establish a shared set of values for urban housing. Once formed, groups will use those values to propose design and policy strategies for proposals that address housing opportunity and climate justice: this can vary in scale from a single home to the block, city and/or region, or policy proposals such as new legislation for climate-just housing. In so doing, students will develop a nuanced understanding of these relationships with climate shocks and stresses.
The class’s assignments are scaffolded, and build upon each other, such that there are deliverables nearly every week. Although there will be formal presentations for the midterm and the final, this scaffolding is structured to alleviate pressure during crunch periods and allow for natural iteration and revision, but less pressure at any given point.
Assignments:
- Assignment 1: For September 16: Create a sketch that reflects your personal understanding of “self” in relation to housing. Share a single or set of housing/residential experiences that have shaped who you are today. This could be a reflection on a specific place where you have lived (home or neighborhood, for example) or a place you have visited but has influenced your personal and professional perspective as a burgeoning professional in the built environment. You will briefly present this sketch in class. You can use a combination of words and imagery (2 minutes).
- Assignment 2: For September 23: Visit two housing developments or building (from List of NYC-area Housing Developments to Visit) and create a sketch that illustrates the illustrates the economic forces on the people who live there.
- Assignment 3: For September 30: Visit a third housing development or building, that differs in scale from your prior assignment, and create a sketch that ecological and atmospheric forces on the people who live there.
- Assignment 4: For October 14: Working in teams, reflect on your case studies and establish a shared understanding and vocabulary for the climate housing challenges you have learned about. This is preparation for the midterm.
- Midterm: For October 22: Working in Teams: Select a case study, either from your work earlier in the semester or one that reflects your own housing and climate interests. Present the ecological, atmospheric, economic, and social forces, and the housing and its residents ability to respond to those pressures. Presentations will also be shown at at Resilient Communities: Development and Displacement Along the New York/New Jersey Bight conference on Saturday October 25 from 9am-5:00 pm.
- Assignment 6: For November 1:.Reflecting on the midterm, articulate a shared set of values and experiences to establish a vision for a climate just housing future.
- Final: Working in Teams: Due December 2. Moving from your group’s set of values: propose an intervention that furthers housing opportunity and recognizes existing or future climate threats.
The class’s work will be compiled into a single volume for virtual (and potentially physical) sharing.
GRADING RUBRIC
Class Participation: 40%
Discussion Leadership: 10%
Midterm: 25%
Final: 25%
Course Summary:
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