This is a vertical elective combining students in their fourth and fifth year of the BArch program with students from the architecture graduate programs. The content of the elective options varies from year to year, and covers advanced topics that invite critical thinking and innovation in the area of urbanism.Section DescriptionIn the current context of climate change, wide-spread inequality, and urban extractivism, the commons have received renewed attention. Sparked by a loss of confidence in the state as the steward of resources and the free market as provider of goods and services, today’s interest in the commons is rooted in their promise of alternative ownership models, fair collective governance, and a more equitable distribution of spatial and material resources. The term “commons” can apply to resources across a range of territories and scales –be they natural, cultural, spatial, material, or immaterial– where ownership, access, and governance are shared. As more and more people search for alternatives to the increasing privatization, commercialization, and gentrification of urban resources, the commons also become a territory for architects ––one that requires participation, collaboration, and collective decision-making along with design. This seminar offers a critical introduction to contemporary sites of the commons with the goal to stake out the shifting territory of architectural agency in their production.Framing the Commons combines seminar and workshop formats structured around 5 commons territories ––environmental resources, spaces of production, spaces of (urban) recreation, spaces of reproduction (domestic space), and information. As students identify constituent components of the commons through texts from within and outside of our discipline, case studies of historical, contemporary, and utopian commons projects will be analyzed through drawings and diagrams with specific attention to the scale and visibility of various commons types. In a final project, the course will collaborate with the community group “the Haight Street Commons”, a network of over 70 domestic communities in San Francisco. Building on the work of Neeraj Bhatia’s Forming Life in Common seminar in the fall, students will consider the design, scale, and visibility of a distributed and networked urban commons.

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