Hopeful Architecture:
Exploring Critical Understandings of Public Spaces
Essential Question
How can we make public spaces feel personal and inviting for more people?
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Audiences
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Project Goals
Social-Emotional Learning
- Students will be able to describe the ways in which their "homeplaces" feel comfortable and accepting.
- Students will apply these understandings of their own homeplaces--as well as their peers'—as they design and co-create public spaces in the classroom and on campus.
Culturally Responsive Pedagogy
- Students will understand how urban planning decisions affect the communities they live in and nearby.
- Students will be able to identify "homeplaces" as sites of comfort, nurture, and resistance.
Critical Pedagogy
- Students will be able to see how decisions by planners in their own communities create either inclusive or exclusive public spaces.
- Students will be able to use those same urban planning tools to design and create new public spaces.
- Students will be able to use those same urban planning tools to critique existing public spaces, looking particularly for the ways in which these spaces perpetuate or resist structures of racism, classism, patriarchy, ableism, and/or other "-isms" they see in the world.
Academic Content
- Students will understand how dystopian novels can be social commentaries.
- Students will understand that public spaces and urban planning can be constructed both to include and exclude.
- Students will be able to see these tools at play in public spaces.
- Students will be able to write effective critiques of public spaces.