Grad Wide Electives are interdisciplinary courses that explore advanced research topics often spanning multiple fields of knowledge. Each course is situated in a home program but any graduate student is eligible to take a grad wide elective. The content of the course options varies from semester to semester. Section Description:Our urban environments are indelibly configured by how we move. With the dual catalysts of a pandemic and the rapid onset of electrified mobility technologies, we are in the midst of a dramatic evolutionary transformation in our patterns of movement, and in turn the fundamental formatting of our cities. In this seminar, we will track the urban geography of changing mobility infrastructures and systems throughout the Bay Area, combining in-class research with in-the-field documentation. Employing experimental cartographic techniques, students will produce field guides that both chronicle mobility’s emerging effects in the city, and also project their speculative potential.In recent years San Francisco and its surrounding communities have been the evolutionary epicenter of a dizzying array of contraptions competing for adoption: scooters, autonomous vehicles, robotic couriers, flying taxis, and a seemingly endless variety of electric bicycles, skateboards, and one-wheelers. Accompanying each of these is an intricate web of logistics, marketing, and regulation as they vie for a foothold in our daily routines and exploit gaps left by struggling mass-transit systems. Moreover, these networks leave a trail of spatial effects — an urban “shadow” — that is both physical (docks, hubs, interchanges, corridors, etc.) and virtual (ride-outs, Lidar clouds, heat maps, surge pricing, on-demand delivery, etc.). Supported by new urbanism initiatives such as the 15-Minute City, these transformations in mobility aim to fundamentally recalibrate the default automotive-centric dimensions by which our cities have been organized for the past century.We will examine the relationship of mobility to wider social and urban circumstances, including equity (who has access & who doesn’t?), economics (how do we pay for & profit from mobility as a society?), technology (platform limits & potential), energy and material (charging distribution, carbon & resource husbandry), politics (reinforcing vs. resisting centralized organization), as well as intersecting urban systems of mass transit, density, and even mobility subcultures. We will collaborate with key mobility researchers, activists, policy-makers and innovators throughout the region. A central goal of the class will be for students to develop critical positions on these transformative mobility trends by evaluating and exposing their potential beneficial or deleterious effects on the city, indeed the various versions of “city” that may result.

Visit Workday to view this information.