Student: Kiaora Motson
Graduation date: December 2019
Type: Concentration (single major)
Date approved: November 2017
Go to concentration landing page
Summary
For my concentration, I hope to explore the relationships between people and the built environment. Specifically, I want to look at the way our visions for ourselves influence the spaces we construct, and how those spaces in turn create us. Looking at urban spaces in particular appeals to me, as the world is becoming increasingly urbanized, such that 6.3 billion people are projected to live, work, and play in urban spaces by 2050 (McCarthy 2017). This shift creates a space full of possibilities as to how we could better plan currently established, growing, and new settlements, in order to enhance community relationships and opportunities.
In the words of Huron (2015), cities are places of saturation. The high number of people in a small space distinguishes cities from the open spaces of rural regions. In this denser style of design, variety marks everything such as land use, people, and types of financial investment. Further, cities cannot be understood without recognizing their position in a greater network of cities and flows or exchanges of information, people and capital. Recognizing cities as “spatially open entities” comprised of such flows “has implications for how we define urban life and for a new politics of the city,” (Johnston et al. 2009).
However, planning of cities happens within a context of colonial power and often recreates historically embedded patterns of exclusion. While urban planning attends to areas such as housing, transportation, and economic and environmental development, little attention has been paid to how attempts of distributing wealth and power still result in their concentration (Ehrefeucht 2017). While cities are recognized by many as places of opportunity, they are also recognized for higher rates of crime, poverty, and inequality.
We cannot create successful cities without the acknowledgement that our urban spaces have not always been built with everyone’s interests in mind. Rather, many have been planned on foundations of exclusion and segregation in the pursuit of capitalistic endeavors, such that today there exists a legacy of unequal distribution of opportunities. How can we address such environmental injustice imposed by policy makers and city planners? While environmental justice narratives have typically invoked issues of point-source environmental toxins and locally undesired land use (Byrne 2015), new theories of environmental justice provide an avenue by which we may tackle spatial injustices in cities. Walker (2017) in particular challenges conventional ideas of EJ being simply issues of distribution (of pollutants, space, housing), and rather calls attention to issues of inclusion and recognition during planning processes. Without recognizing excluded groups as being systemically devalued and unable to participate in procedures of decision making (Walker 2017), mainstream EJ movements will ultimately prove less than effective. By problematizing conceptions of distribution and space in EJ scholarship, we may begin to lift a veil on other unseen forms and causes of inequality and poverty.
As we envision future of our cities, I want to hesitate before simply indulging utopic dreams of seamless justice, efficiency, and resiliency. Before we look ahead, we must look both at the past and present. We must recognize in whose vision the built environment of today’s cities exists, to better understand the cycles of social and economic inequality.
References
Byrne, Jason A. 2015. “Environmental Justice – Geography – Oxford Bibliographies – Obo.” May 6, 2015. http://www.oxfordbibliographiesonline.com/view/document/obo-9780199874002/obo-9780199874002-0008.xml.
Ehrenfeucht, Renia. n.d. “Urban Planning and Geography – Geography – Oxford Bibliographies – Obo.” Accessed October 9, 2017. http://www.oxfordbibliographiesonline.com/view/document/obo-9780199874002/obo-9780199874002-0080.xml.
Huron, Amanda. 2015. “Working with Strangers in Saturated Space: Reclaiming and Maintaining the Urban Commons.” Antipode 47 (4):963–79. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12141.
Johnston, Ron, Pratt, Geraldine, Watts, Michael, and Whatmore, Sarah, eds. 2009. The Dictionary of Human Geography. Hoboken: Wiley. Accessed October 9, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
McCarthy, Linda. 2017. “Urban Geography – Geography – Oxford Bibliographies – Obo.” Accessed October 9. http://www.oxfordbibliographiesonline.com/view/document/obo-9780199874002/obo-9780199874002-0084.xml.
Walker, Gordon. 2017. Chapter 1 Beyond Distribution and Proximity: Exploring the Multiple Spatialities of Environmental Justice.
Questions
- Descriptive: What has motivated decisions relating to urban design? How has the use of limited space in cities changed over the last century?
- Explanatory: How have profit and power influenced the design of urban space? How can cities be understood as more than space within a geographic and political boundary, and rather as flows of information, resources, people, and capital?
- Evaluative: What factors play into how people experience the built environment differently? How does the organization of and distribution within densely populated urban spaces give rise to conflict, opportunity, and harmony? How have systems of inequality been instilled and perpetuated in the construction of the built environment?
- Instrumental: As more people move to cities, what opportunities exist to improve their access to communities, space, and capital? Can planning of cities serve to break cycles of poverty and end reproductive institutions of inequality?
Concentration courses
- ENVS 460 (Environmental Law and Policy, 4 credits), fall 2018. A course related to environmental policy will provide information pertinent to urban policy and planning.
- HIST 239 (Constructing the American Landscape, 4 credits), spring 2019. This course explores the social forces that have constructed the built environment, specifically as they pertain to urban spaces.
- SOAN 398 (Political Economy of Black Labor, 4 credits), fall 2017. This course explores how black labor has been an essential component of capitalism within the United States that cannot be ignored.
- ECON 332 (Urban Economics, 4 credits), fall 2018. This course explores the economic forces behind land use and human activity within cities.
- SOAN 365 (Political Economy of Green Capitalism, 4 credits), fall 2018. This course explores criticisms of capitalism, specifically as it relates to green technologies and consumerism.
Arts and humanities courses
- HIST 261 (Global Environmental History, 4 credits). Pre-approved A&H course; no justification required.
- PHIL 215 (Philosophy and the Environment, 4 credits). Pre-approved A&H course; no justification required.