CAT 2: Designing Equality
Nancy Kwak
Syllabus: CAT2_WI12_Kwak_Syllabus.pdf
San Diego embodies some of the greatest challenges of the 21st century city. It is at once a sprawl of breathtaking mansions and an ever-burgeoning landscape of foreclosed properties, a city of PhDs and overcrowded classrooms. Like other globalizing areas, the city is driven by a transnational flow of capital, workers, and ideas, a flow that is sensed but not well understood by many San Diegans or Californians. In this class, we will scrutinize the relationship between these transnational flows and urban inequality. By learning about how ideas, people, and dollars migrate not only in San Diego, but in other cities across the US, we will be able to analyze evolving inequalities as a part of larger economic systems.
In addition to studying the macro-level causes of inequality, we will scrutinize design. How have architects, urban planners, and politicians shaped access to resources? How can we adjust existing design to build better blocks, neighborhoods, cities? The course will end with students locating one specific inequality in San Diego and designing a simple, affordable solution to the same.
