Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

This course provides an opportunity for students to study one or more urban studies topics that lie beyond the scope of the other courses. This course will normally provide a more research-intensive experience than other graduate urban studies courses.

COURSE DETAILS:

Storyscapes: Decolonizing the city through arts and culture

This course explores the colonialism embedded into the stories, landscapes, and systems of the North American city, and how Indigenous arts and culture can offer pathways to sustainable, equitable, and resilient cities. Focuses on Vancouver and the recent culture plan, Culture|Shift.  

Course Details  

Colonialism within the North American city has inscribed certain narratives and built forms onto Indigenous lands. This has contributed to the erasure of pre-existing laws, governance, knowledge systems, languages, cultural practises, etc. What are the consequences of this erasure? What are the transformative possibilities when Indigenous arts and culture, and other marginalized/erased stories are (re)inscribed onto the land and help to define the identity and public culture of the city? Drawing on a variety of sources—including public art, video, and poetry—this class will explore the embedded inequities within traditional planning in Canada, and other ways of looking at/relating to the land in urbanized settings.  

With an emphasis on Vancouver, traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, this course will pay close attention to the narratives and norms embedded into Vancouver’s tangible and intangible cultural landscapes and planning approaches. The City’s recent culture plan Culture|Shift: Blanketing the City in Arts and Culture will provide a guide to some ways Vancouver is attempting to decolonize. What are ways forward? What has been done and what can be done to make our cities and the ways we make decisions about them more reflective of Indigenous people’s ways of knowing, shaping, and living in relationship with places? While critically examining the colonialism in our cities, this class will be rich with Indigenous voices to affirm that every North American city is an Indigenous City.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: