Publics
Publics is the study of human groups and their roles, interactions, and experiences within built and natural environments. This domain within the Master in Design Studies Program supports novel approaches to socio-spatial design, planning, activism, advocacy, and implementation. Through design thinking the program engages the concerns of multiple stakeholders (public, private, community, institutional, nonprofit) at a range of scales (neighborhoods, cities, and regions) to offer a strategic and conceptual mindset capable of preparing for, coping with, and anticipating the effects of historic extraction, chronic disinvestment, rapid change, disaster, and other forms of disadvantage and precarity that challenge society’s most vulnerable. The Publics Domain enables students to research, articulate, and propose restorative, protective, and pre-emptive forms of transdisciplinary practice and pedagogy aimed towards realizing the above-mentioned goals as well as the larger common good.
Issues of interest
Among the high priority areas of interest are economic and social inequality, climate change, territorial conflicts, chronic violence, racial and ethnic antagonisms, and other polarized political logics that challenge democracy yet are ever present in our built and natural environments.
Focus of Study
To understand and intervene in such issues, students in the Publics Domain analyze the relationships and power structures that establish the economic, social, political, and cultural conditions that impact livelihoods, forms of engagement and the physicality of everyday life-worlds. In addressing these challenges, we encourage students to define what constitutes the Public, both spatially and socially, and to ask how it might become legible and active in ways that advance the common good. In the spirit of criticality, we also ask why a concern with the Public would be desirable and raise questions about who historically has been included or excluded in public deliberations, why or why not. As such, this domain seeks to offer advanced study for those seeking to prepare for future work in three general areas:
- Critical, transdisciplinary design, planning, and management practices working within or for the public and private sector in various capacities related to public land, public health and environment, public infrastructures, public realm, public benefits, rights and participation; public investment; and other forms of public engagement related to the common good
- Advanced research and teaching in and adjacent to the design and planning disciplines, including the development of critical social pedagogy that advances the integration of and connection between social and design theories and narratives, artistic practices, and other forms of emancipatory or counter-hegemonic engagement that counter socio-spatial conditions of injustice, disparity, and inequality
- Leadership in political, governmental, NGO, philanthropy and non-profit sectors involving public policy, investment, participation, and advocacy
The Publics domain is structured around a curriculum that includes classes taught by the faculty in all three departments of the GSD including Architecture, Urban Planning and Design, and Landscape Architecture. During their residence students are encouraged to look across these departments as well as for courses across the university for the purposes of fostering interdisciplinary pursuits. All students in the Publics domain will be required to take the proseminar course in the first semester. Students will also need to complete three additional core courses in the first year to fulfill requirement of the following themes:
- General concepts of governance and participation
- General concepts of societal and political conflict, crisis, or contestation that effect the built and natural environment
- Forms of practice that engage the multiple and varied forms of publics across GSD disciplines
- Representational, mapping, or visual applications
- Research methodologies
Proseminar in PUBLICS: Of the Public. In the Public. By the Public.
Public, as a noun or adjective, is not confined to a single discipline, practice, narrative or theory. It is instead, a complex notion used to dictate the rules and regulations that order our cities, to reveal or produce knowledge about the city, and to include or exclude the right to the city – which itself has many meanings beyond the occupation, control, and/or redesign of urban space. As a social construct it is historically produced through aspiration and contention within and between citizens, state actors, and markets. With all these complexities in mind, this proseminar seeks to define what constitutes the Public, spatially, socially, and politically. It asks how the notion of the Public becomes legible and desirable, as well as who gets the right to create it and for whom. Lectures, discussions, and debates will interrogate what it means to be public; of the public; in the public; for the public, with the public, or by the public. Each proposition holds a different implication for design, democracy, processes, and populations when overlaid with the compounding issues of our time – economic and social inequality, climate change, population growth and decline, territorial conflicts, health and violence epidemics, aging infrastructures, and eroding trust in democratic governance. The course will draw from scholars, practitioners, and everyday folk to build foundational intelligence and provocative interpretations of social and spatial publics as well their potential to advance the commitment to commoning and more just futures.
Domain Head
Diane Davis, Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism; and CIFAR Fellow and Co-Director “Humanity’s Urban Future”