Urban Cultures: Reading and Representing the Urban

Curriculum: Architecture Design Media, California College of the Arts, Architecture Division

Date: Spring 2025

Professor: Julia Grinkrug

Students: Canyon Allan ,Sofia Garcia, Rocio Urbano Guadalix,Jerome Kim, Makoto Komine, Loel Quevedo, Anhelina Rozum, Amira Seale.

Community Partner: Oakland Allied Knowledge for Climate Action (OAK)

Related Programming: Walking Tour - Adam Garrett-Clark

OUR FOCUS IN THIS COURSE

Our work is grounded in interdisciplinary research, and we investigate how cities evolve through the interplay of people, form, and flows. We approach urban environments as dynamic, layered systems of and dig into these layers of history to shape exciting possibilities that priorities people and roots.

Organized into three broad themes — People, Form and Flows — the course projects introduce students to a series of protagonists, approaches and value systems, as well as specific modes of storytelling.

PROJECT 1: PEEOPLE

This section — on people — examines both top-down and bottom-up approaches for understanding human behavior, sited culture, and lifestyles that represent how people engage with the city. The top

PROJECT 2: FORM

This section of the seminar will examine the relationship between urban types and protocols by unpacking the intertwined imprints of land use and organization, zoning and ownership patterns, physical conditions and programmatic factors driven by political and economic forces,

PROJECT 2 : FLOWS

Seeing the city through the lens of regional systems, networks and flows recognizes the city as part of an integrated multi-scalar organization. This section will focus on the interplay between ecology and economy as a way to unpack discourses on landscape or ecological urbanism, infrastructural urbanism, network theory, logistics, and territorialization.

zINE