Global Urban Humanities/Future Histories Lab

Instructor:  Ghigo DiTommaso, Erika Chong Shuch

Term: Spring 2015

Course #: Landscape Architecture 254 / Theater, Dance, Performance Studies 266

Why Read This Case Study?

The disciplines of environmental design and of performance both focus on bodies and space, but their teaching methods are often siloed.

In this graduate theory course, Public Space: Placemaking and Performance, taught by choreographer and performance maker Erika Chong Shuch and urban designer Ghigo DiTommaso, students from disciplines ranging from anthrolopogy to architecture to dance were asked to research notions of public space using methods from both performance and design.

The results yielded important insights into public space. Perhaps even more importantly, the pedagogical benefits of incorporating exercises such as movement and drawing in disciplines where they are not usually included became clear.

As one of the earliest classes in UC Berkeley’s interdisciplinary Global Urban Humanities Initiative, this course helped lay the groundwork for incorporating cross-disciplinary assignments in other courses in the project.

The course expanded on interdisciplinary methods pioneered by choreographer Anna Halprin and landscape architect Lawrence Halprin in the 1970s with a heightened awareness of race, difference, and inequality.

In the faculty reflection starting on page 18, the instructors speak frankly about the challenges and rewards of this kind of teaching, and on how it impacted their own artistic and professional practices.