The planet is becoming more urban every day. Yet scholars in two academic domains that have lots to say about city life, humanities departments and architecture schools, rarely talk to each other. What if they did?
That’s the key question behind a new effort to reimagine urban studies.
Roughly a dozen institutions—including Cornell University, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and the University of California at Berkeley and at Los Angeles—are participating in the new “Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities” program, quietly begun in December by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Mellon expects to invest between $12- and $15-million in the initial round of projects.
American urban studies arose in a social-science context in the mid-20th century, in response to problems of inner-city blight. Today urban research often involves the quantitative analysis of large data sets. Researchers will, say, crunch numbers about income levels in a given geographic area, in the hope of creating better social policy.
The emerging Mellon-backed projects, sometimes described as “urban humanities,” are trying a different approach. These efforts seek to combine the spatial and modeling skills of architects with the interpretive muscle of historians, philosophers, and other humanists. The rationale is that contemporary urban problems like climate change and housing are too complicated for any one discipline.
More than half of the world’s population lives in urban areas today, and that figure is projected to reach 70 percent by 2050. Many people will experience conditions of unprecedented sprawl and density, says Mariët Westermann, a Mellon vice president. The new urban reality “raises fundamental questions about the human condition,” she says, “which is the traditional field that the humanities busy themselves with.”
How do notions of community or identity change in conditions of superdensity? How can megacities manage resource allocation? How can they deal with social diversity in compressed spaces?
“We’re facing all these unfamiliar physical and social environments for which our conventional notions—and even our descriptive language of city and suburb, exurb, and so forth—are no longer relevant,” Ms. Westermann says. “The whole descriptive vocabulary of urbanism is in flux. Humanists might well have something to say about that.”
Displaying Relevance
The effort also serves a less-explicit purpose: showcasing the relevance of humanities disciplines, at a time when reports and news articles have renewed a sense that they are in crisis.
In June, a panel formed by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences criticized humanities scholars for inward-looking research. The New York Times published a front-page story last month under the headline, “As Interest Fades in the Humanities, Colleges Worry.”
“The relevance of the humanities has to have new rhetoric,” says Dana Cuff, a professor of architecture and urban design who leads the urban-humanities effort at UCLA. The sciences, she notes, have succeeded in getting resources and public attention and in making their arguments clear. “For those of us in the arts and humanities to do the same, we really need to be explicit about where our contributions lie.”
The new Mellon program is just getting off the ground. But UCLA’s experience offers one early glimpse of what urban humanities might look like. It also suggests the challenges of collaborating with colleagues who speak with different disciplinary vocabularies.
Backed by $2-million from Mellon, Ms. Cuff and her colleagues are essentially trying to start a small urban-humanities department, which will offer certificates to graduate students. So far, the students hail from history, architecture, urban planning, public policy, philosophy, and geography, among other fields.
“We’re all people who are interested in urban issues but are dissatisfied with our own discipline’s ability to grapple with those issues,” says Jonathan Crisman, project director and a core faculty member in the Urban Humanities Initiative.
These urban humanists convene in the basement offices of cityLAB, a research-and-design think tank in UCLA’s School of the Arts and Architecture. The lab, founded by Ms. Cuff in 2006, is plastered with futuristic designs that reflect its cross-disciplinary efforts to think up new approaches to urban problems. One design increases density with backyard homes. Another promotes health with beachlike facilities downtown.
The Urban Humanities Initiative kicked off with a summer institute that taught mapping, film, and installation techniques. Students then plunged into coursework that focuses on a contemporary issue in a specific urban context. This year’s theme: “risk” in Tokyo. The topic encompasses everything from the post-World War II U.S. occupation of Japan to the 2011 earthquake and nuclear meltdown. (Next year’s focus will be “identity” in Shanghai.)
When a Chronicle reporter stopped by on a recent Monday afternoon, students were taking part in a humanities-style graduate seminar led in part by William Marotti, a historian who writes about art-based activism in 1950s and 60s Japan. But they were also working on a design-oriented project: imagining a future protest, in which the students chose the space, appearance, and agenda. (“They may perform it in literal space, or they may not,” Ms. Cuff explained.)
After class, the reporter watched as one group of students—drawn from architecture, policy, geography, and philosophy—met with professors to present their research on protesters who make themselves up like clowns.
With so many disciplines represented, discussion can turn contentious, Mr. Crisman says. At times someone from one discipline will use a term that’s “taboo” in another. For example, “everyday,” used in Mr. Marotti’s historical research, often has negative connotations for architects.
Meanwhile, at Cornell, which is also participating in the Mellon program, professors and students want to study how rising sea levels affect city planning, Ms. Westermann says. The group—scholars from architecture and planning, plus humanists experienced in areas like historical research and ethnography—would focus on the Netherlands and Mumbai, she says, and would visit those locations.
They would see what could be learned by analyzing historical landscapes in those places. And they would work in the communities to investigate what is at stake when, say, you suddenly throw up a big sea wall—for both the ecosystem and the livelihood of slum dwellers.
A philosopher, says Ms. Westermann, might be helpful in tackling that kind of question.
“To study rising sea level, of course, you might think, well, all we really need is engineers to solve that problem, and climate scientists,” she says. “But it is in a way wresting that discourse a bit away from that automatic assumption—that science is the only thing that’s going to help us there.”
Ms. Westermann hopes that architecture students will learn from the linguistic and visual ways that humanities scholars represent the experience of people living in cities. As for humanities scholars, they might “become a little bit more concrete and less metaphoric about the ways that they talk and think about cities.”
