artifact sheet

  The Urban Situation This summer, California Governor Jerry Brown pledged the State of California to sponsor a global climate summit in San Francisco, CA., during the month of September, 2018, to pursue the goals of the Paris Climate Accord in defiance of US President Trumps’ decision to withdraw the United States from this global agreement. Governor Jerry Brown states that the primary mission of summit it ----“to get it together to roll back the forces of carbonization and join together to combat existential threat of climate change.”   It is not the first time that California has taken such a dominate role in shaping the Global environment and radicalize United States urban history. One hundred seventy years ago, in 1848, gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill on the Sacramento River, in what was then Mexican Territory. Today the gold mines have been played out, and Silicon Valley is now a global open pit mine spewing out binary dust into our atmosphere, landscape ecologies, urban imaginaries and altering our everyday climate.   California and its neighbor states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, Nevada and Arizona are linked together in a panoramic social, economic, political, ecological and cultural landscape, a sprawling urban megalopolis, forming what is called the “New West’ by speculators, the Next American Metropolis” by urban planner, Peter Calthorpe and an “inescapable ecology” by historian, Professor Linda Nash. Its physical features, histories, food, music, fashion, crimes and dreams have been projected across the global as movie backdrops, lifestyle habits, urban visions and terms by which we frame a civil climate and sustainable places. The myth of the California and its neighbors as a “Golden State” has been cultivated over many years and continues to be projected as the “climate” model for future global urban landscapes. Behind the “golden state” sunset is a more turbulent reality of human struggles, precarious ecological and complex interrelated systems which needs to revealed to fully understand what is being sold.   FORM, INHABITATION AND INFRASTRUCTURE Three Signature Physical Characteristics for Reading the urban landscape of the California Dream The urban landscape that we will explore is vast in scale, layered with deep histories, rich in diverse natural resources, occupied by a mix of cultures and diverse in competing perspectives. The selected signature characteristics, form, inhabitation, and infrastructure, I believe are key to reading and understanding California’s unique contributions and thematic variations of urban theories, practices and future urbanism visions. When assembled, I see them as circumscribing the signature civil terrain of California dream for sustainable urbanism. Below is the list of those characteristics, with an accompanying set of exploratory questions, to deepen our understanding of each feature individually and to reveal the ways in which the three combine and intersect each other producing today’s urban situation. In-addition these questions have been written as lens for deciphering lectures, readings and discussions, as well as, guide to help you draw out ideas and images for your assignments analyzing the signature physical characteristics of the urban landscape that represents the California’s Dream of sustainable urbanism. The three signature physical characteristics are; 1. The form, shape and configuration of this urban landscape What are the circulating future projections or “imaginaries” -- political narratives, human stories, photographic/painted images, lifestyle experiences and social aspirations -- that appear in visionary images, a plan’s figure and contour or a map’s terrain for reshaping the existing land into a desired future urban landscape? How is this imagined future urban landscape reshaped or altered when people encounter the “realties” of existing terrain’s natural system configuration, ecological processes and climatic atmosphere? How have the actions driven by these two questions- “imaginaries and realities”-combined into the complex formsof the existing urban landscape and built environment? 2. The inhabitation practices in this urban landscape How are domestic living patterns, dwelling environments and public spaces designed to represent people’s physical relationship to the natural and/or built place? What are the everyday public practices, “arts and/or acts”, that people use to build social, economic and political relational systems and ways of sustaining links between each other inside a community and reaching out, across town to other similar and different communities?   How do these two ways of relating generate the architecture and landscape architecture visions for a carefree built environment; designs for living such as products, fashion, food and interiors; backdrop climate, of paintings, music, photos, film scenes and land art portraying the sun and noir realities of inhabiting “open environment”? 3. The infrastructure systems that underpin this urban landscape. What are the “public and corporate systems” that underpin this vast urban region’s collectively constructed and shared economic life and environment?   What are their underlying order – political power debates, socio/technological ideas, physical forms, logistical needs, distribution challenges and resource processes? How have these systems hybridized -- evolved over time, been co-opted by local people, altered by natural systems such that “infrastructure” has become background for local collective existence, identity, history, creating opportunities to add social, cultural and ecological functions and enriching the place, building connections and recharging ecological processes/ resources? Course Organization and Semester Assignment To unpack Californian Dreaming’s rich and complex story and deliver upon the course outcomes the schedule of lectures, readings and assignments has been organized into three different parts: 1. The Urban Situation, 2. Background and Foreground and 3. Reflecting on the California Dream Part 2. September 27 through December 6 Background and Foreground Rather follow a chronological timeline of this region’s rich and complex history, Part 2. has be composed of nine “thematic” lectures building upon the three signature characteristics defined above. Each lecture will present set strategic topics or pivot points in this long history that frame key contextual layers, episodic events, and a wide range of diverse and contested perspectives that underpin the background of today’s urban visions. For each lecture students are required to produce a page for each lecture, from the perspective of one of three spatial systems Assignment: - 1 page (half page words+half page image) artifact sheet base on the readings, select one of the three characteristics as a lens to frame your written and visual essay/sheet reflecting upon the lecture and readings.