Course Details

The Ecology of Urban Seattle examines social, design, political, and environmental factors that promote healthy urban neighborhoods and the integration of urban communities and ecological realities. We will use these interactions to gain a deeper awareness of how these systems function in relationship to each other, to social and economic diversity, and to growth management and climate change. A Race and Social Justice (RSJ) screen will be employed as a key element in evaluating how communities are shaped. Cities function as a place where human communities come together to work, live, and interact. They also exist in a specific social, political, and ecological context, including the relationship between development and the environment, the interaction of human habitation and natural systems, and the relationship of human activities to the health of diverse cultures and the long-term viability of the local and global climate. This class tells the story of the emerging urban paradigm built around resilience and sustainability, along with the social context through which that evolves (past and future). Participants will study three communities, take field trips to them, review their history and ecological context, examine the course of neighborhood development, and discuss these elements in class. The instructor will lead the class through an RSJ review of each community, beginning with an introduction to the technique and presentation on the initial neighborhood, and leading to student papers applying the RSJ screen to a neighborhood.