ARC 342R.16 / ARC 388R.27 / CRP 392C.1 / U D 389R.1
Tues 2.00pm--5.00pm, SUT 3.112
Open to all UTSOA grad students and advanced undergrads
Michael Holleran: holleran@utexas.edu
Planning history often focuses on utopias, reforms, and precedents, and design history on the superlative and the avant garde. This course looks instead at changing norms and processes: how the ordinary environment was ordinarily produced, by and for whom. Its focus is the United States from the early 19th to the late 20th century.
Course objectives:
- Gain familiarity with the history of American urban development in terms of material culture, cultural landscapes, and environmental history; in terms of process as well as product;
- Learn the historian’s methods: constructing narrative based on evidence from primary sources;
Learn to consume historical narrative critically.
Reading and discussion topics include land and water; the domestic environment; infrastructure; regulation hard and soft; transportation, centers and suburbs; re-building the city. Course assignments let students pursue their own interests among these topics.
