Living in Places Studying Spaces: Archlgical and Crit. approaches to Spatial Production and Practice

This class will provide students with an understanding of space as socially constituted in the interactions between people and things. It will explore the multiple scales at which space is constituted and the modalities of this production. This exploration will emphasize the role and constitution of power, and consequently politics, in these interactions. In doing so, it also provides a historical introduction to several theories of space as they have been mobilized to examine spatial relations and explain social relations and change, including environmental adaptation, political relations, and identity and ideology. It also equips students with a body of theoretical tools to examine the spaces and places they find themselves in and might examine academically. As such then this class will equip students with the ability to move beyond perceptions of space as a `container,' within which things, people and practices are located along x,y, and z axes, to instead understand the ways in which places and the relationships between them are constituted, to produce space. Further, in understanding the constitution of space, it will elaborate the relationships between space, ideology, and socio-political order. This attention to the constitution of space, will equip them to both understand and explain why `Landscape (parsed as space in the usage of this class) is politics,' as Smith argues in the introductory reading of this class in week 1.