Politics and space are intimately bound. From the scale of the body, up through the scale of buildings and cities and on to the scale of the landscape, those with political, cultural, economic and social power exercise explicit and implicit control over the shaping and occupation of space. As architects, it is critical that we understand this physical and spatial manifestation of power relationships. This seminar will explore the ways that power, politics, economics, and social and cultural hierarchies are made physical and will survey and analyze resulting building, public space, urban, and landscape patterns around the globe. Of perhaps greater importance, in this election year, we will also be exploring architectural and urban design tactics, strategies and practices that challenge, subvert or seek to reverse these hierarchies.This seminar will not give you facts, figures or any other sort of empirical knowledge. Instead it will give you a series of new lenses with which to see and, ultimately act in and upon, the physical world around you. Many of the analytical approaches and methods we will be using come from fields such as cultural geography, human geography, cultural anthropology and critical cartography. These fields are terrific at analyzing and critiquing the physical world and human practices in relationship to it. However, while learning critical lessons from these fields, this seminar will move beyond a statement of the issues, no matter how sophisticated. As architects, we are engaged in direct action in the physical world. We search for design solutions. To this end, in this seminar, we will be looking at a wide range of strategies for action in response to the physical issues created by the impression of power upon space.

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