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ARCH 533a: The Urban Landscape—An Ecosystem Approach
Fall 2000, T Th, 9:00-10:50 am
School of Architecture, University of Southern California, Los Angeles
Instructor: Ashwani Vasishth
E-mail: ashwani@csun.edu
Telephone: (818) 677-6137
Course website: http://www.csun.edu/~vasishth
Course Context
The
city and the country, nature and culture, human and natural–we have constructed
many ways of dividing up the world. Most often, and at least in their origins,
the construction of these divisions has been purposive and grounded in rather
specific intent. But over time they have taken on a realism of their own,
fueled by our drive to generalize.
To
paraphrase Raymond Williams, the history of our ideas of "the city"
contains within it a quite extraordinary account of the history of divisions we
have made between humans and Nature. This is the history we are concerned with,
in our effort to rethink the place of humans and of human affairs in Nature.
Conventional modes of bounding Nature, and our customary categorizations of
natural and human aspects of the world have been challenged, both by practical
experience and by advances in science–particularly those in evolutionary
ecosystem ecology. Nested scale-hierarchic process-function descriptions of the
occurring world offer potentially new sets of conceptual and organizational
tools for putting the city back into nature. As such, this course explores the
development of an ecosystem approach to the city–an urban ecology.
One
basic intention of this course is to explore the constructedness of our
conceptions of nature and environment. This is not at all to suggest that
environmental issues--both detrimental and benign--are not real. As we shall
find, they are very real indeed. But not always in ways we would expect. Many
of our mis-steps in environmental planning derive from these sorts of
misconceptions. In this sense, description is a world-maker and asking the
right question counts more than the rightness of any answer.
Our
notions of rationality, objectivity, and science are valuable because they are
social constructs rather than things apart. And they have served us well mainly
because they have changed with time and circumstance. Then what it means to us
to "be scientific" becomes the core about which our understandings of
the world are layered. How we see determines not merely what we see, but also
what we do not. For the history of environmental planning shows clearly that
what we see is never all we get. Unintended consequences, surprise,
"side" effects, these are some of the labels we use to signify the
failure of our descriptions, and as often as not, it is our solutions that are
the bigger problem--or rather, our belief in the singular truth of our
solutions.
Everything
is most certainly not connected to everything else. We would not be, if this
were truly the case. However, everything most certainly is connected to a few
other things in such a way that everything can at the least be shown to be
connectable to any other thing. Then, intelligent abstraction--the art of
taking a bit of the world out of our world, moving it this way and that, and
then seeking to re-insert it into our world--requires a humility that marks an
awareness of our necessarily incomplete perceptions of what we call reality.
Open
systems, as opposed to closed systems, show certain properties. Properties that
make them problematic to planning--and disastrous if we refuse to acknowledge
them. Situations of the open sort are evolutionary--in the sense of being
responsive to their world, not in the sense of any drive to perfection. There
are no singular, definitive formulations of these situations, and nor do they
carry within them any basis for a stopping rule, a point at which we can call
closure to our enterprise, claim success, and head home to bed. Its not just
that what we see of such systems is always incomplete, but rather that what we
see depends on where we position ourselves, and our purpose in looking.
So
the plurality we find in the world about us is neither arbitrary not
capricious, but rather contingent and conditional. This is the inherent
problematic of environmental planning. The temporal, spatial, and
organizational scales we use to make our descriptions, the boundaries we
construct to make our world more manageable, the evolutionary responsiveness
that confounds our efforts to learn by doing, to rely on trial and error, these
are the attributes of our reality--and attentiveness, an ability to respond in
turn to the moves of our world, to engage it in conversation, are the skills we
need to develop to live intelligently within our world. And histories,
boundaries and scale become the devices we use to get a handle on this thing we
call our environment.
Very
broadly, the course sorts into three parts. In the first we will explore how we
think about thinking about nature, how metaphor and analogy become Swiss Army
knives in our effort to come to know what it is we do not know. We shall test
the territories staked out for us by social theory and by psychology, and
recognize the limits of conventional accounts of reality and rationality. In
the second part, we shall take up specific issues--air quality, water,
deforestation, biodiversity and habitat loss, atmospheric change and climate
effects, toxins and bio-engineering, and population growth. And in the third
part of our course, we shall synthesize our explorations to give us an
understanding of what it means to take an ecosystem approach to nature.
Course Objective
Cities,
at almost any point in human history, have represented the state-of-the-art in
our ability to control and modify Nature. And yet, like every other aspect of
the human enterprise, cities sit wholly within the processes and functions that
constitute what it is we take to be natural. As such, the purpose of this
course is two-fold. First, we are interested in exploring the processes and
functions that both constrain and constitute our cities–the "natural
elements," as it were. And second, we are interested in testing the
metaphors and categories we often take for granted, the boundaries we rarely
think to question, and the depictions we so readily take to be factual when we
think to plan our designs within the City.
Course Requirements
This
is a research-driven, discussion-oriented lecture course. As such, reading and
attendance are pre-requisite (read compulsory) and heavily weighted in the
grading scheme (30%: 10% attendance, 20% participation). Individual research
projects will be crafted on the basis of your own interest and in-class
discussion (40%). There will additionally, be occasional assignments based on
designated readings (30%).
Course Schedule (Provisional)
Week#1 Introduction
to urban ecology issues and ecosystem ecology concepts
Week#2,
3, 4 The Elements: Air, Water, Fire
Week#5
Biogeochemistry
Week
#6,7 Biosis
Week
#8 Synthesis
Course Readings
See
Bibligraphy for Course Reader
[Last Update: October 25,
2000]