This OER provides the framework for an 8-week module that proposes a restructuring of the current URBST 222: Introduction to Urban Housing course from a lecture/exam format to a lecture/scaffolded project on social space and public housing (i.e., NYCHA). I’m proposing a front-loaded semester; the second half would consist of workshops to help students compete their report as well as short lectures, readings, and quizzes covering housing financialization and non-market alternatives. The 8-week module consists of weekly lectures, with alternating weeks of homework (based on assigned content) and place-based reflection assignments that utilize Henri Lefebvre’s spatial triad to help students engage with the constitutive elements of social space during their walking site observations.
Included in detail here are the various place-based reflection assignments and in-class activities that supplement these assignments and reveal relationships (including tensions and omissions) between students’ embodied experiences of “walking the city” and the abstract representations of urban space we often rely on to study the city. This OER does not include the weekly homework assignments nor lectures themselves but does provide topical titles and learning objectives for the lectures and a partial list of assignable content. Please see the Module Assignment at the end for the detailed assignments/activities and content list.
Lastly, this OER is intended to be flexible and adaptable such that educators can use and modify single assignments or apply the framework to a different geography with a history of public housing.
The main learning goals of the course are:
- Critique the values of market- and non-market-based solutions to housing.
- Describe the history of discriminatory housing policy in the U.S. and analyze its structural implications with respect to race, class, and gender.
- Understand the history and criticisms surrounding public housing in the U.S. and analyze what Professor of Urban and Regional Planning, Ed Goetz, describes as two narratives regarding public housing and its subsequent “dismantling”.
- Develop an analysis and critique of RAD/PACT policies as implemented in NYC with a focus on NYCHA properties in Queens.
- Be able to translate embodied experiences of urban space into analytical knowledge using Lefebvre’s spatial triad.