[Past] 37 How Americans Live, Work, Shop, and Play and What it Means for the Environment - Spring 2020
WATCH THE COURSE PREVIEW VIDEO
CLASS NUMBER:
760-34
INSTRUCTOR:
TIME:
Wednesdays, 6:15-8:45 PM
LOCATION:
242 Classroom Building
DESCRIPTION:
People take the places where they spend their waking hours for granted. Yet the landscape we inhabit is a complex product of history, of economics, of government action and of personal tastes. For most of American history, where people lived depended on where they worked (and hence on the needs of the firms that employed them) and where they shopped and played depended on where they lived. Technological changes, particularly highways and the Internet, would seem to fundamentally change those relationships, yet the hand of the past still lies heavily on the landscape. This course will show how various forces produced the American landscape, the surprising role of a few “visionaries,” and how land use choices affect the natural environment.
Living: Early cities, birth of the streetcar suburb, the “landscape of race,” post WWII suburbanization, slums and Urban Renewal, the abortive “New Town” movement, exurbs, urban revival, gentrification, second homes, New Urbanism
Working: the Industrial Revolution, early offices, the elevator and the “skyscraper,” multi-story and one-story industrial buildings, agglomeration economies, growth of the service sector, women in the labor force, open offices, working from home, WeWork
Shopping: the “high street,” the department store, Sears and catalog sales, the automobile and strip commercial, chain stores, Big Box I, Big Box II, the shopping mall (open and enclosed), outlet stores, dollar stores, e-commerce
Playing: Olmsted and urban parks, National parks, rail tourism for the rich, automobile tourism (Blue Ridge Parkway), festival tourism (from Chatauqua to Woodstock to Burning Man), the Disney parks, virtual tourism
Impacts on the Environment – Air, Water, Land, Climate – Andrew Goudie (Human
Impact on the Natural Environment – Table 5.7 of fourth ed. – 7th ed online at Duke); urban wildlife
Driving Forces
The work-live-school nexus
Transportation technologies
Demographics
Visionaries (Andrew Jackson Downing, Olmsteds – father and son, Wallace Nichols, William Levitt, Robert Moses, Jane Jacobs, Victor Gruen, James Rouse, Andres Duany)
Government Action (the Vernacular Landscape v. the Official Landscape)
Literature and Art: The Jungle, The Warmth of Other Suns, John Cheever (Checkov of the Suburbs—the Swimmer), Stepford Wives, David Sedaris, art (Riis, Lozowick, Ashcan School, John Sloan)
Environmental Studies, History, Sociology