Concepts for Understanding Space in the Americas

Catalog description

To study the built environment of the Americas is to deal with an inherent contradiction. While our disciplines of architecture, urban design, landscape, and planning share the fundamental belief that spaces matter; an overwhelming majority of our knowledge comes from another continent. As reminded by Edward Said in the classic “Orientalism” of 1974, European culture developed narratives about all other societies on Earth and as a result established itself as the center of human knowledge. One could easily apply Said’s orientalism to a certain “occidentalism” of the American continent and we shall ask what such narrative entails. According to the Eurocentric narrative, the Americas were a vast continent empty of sophisticated cultures and ready to be conquered by superior knowledge of the self-proclaimed “old world”. This course looks into an array of spatial concepts developed by Americans (understood here of course as anyone who is rooted in the continent, from Chile to Alaska); in order to provide Penn undergraduate students with the intellectual tools to understand such spaces.