Housing Cohort
We are in the middle of a national and global housing crisis, with safe and affordable housing becoming increasingly scarce. How did we get here?
The Housing cohort will examine the theme of housing across the four engagements domains: empirical, differences, aesthetics, and ethics. Along the way, students will grapple with different definitions of homes, housing, and shelter. We will not only think about what these spaces mean, but also learn how to describe them, to understand why and how housing and homes are important, and articulate what domestic spaces mean to us. To do so, we will engage with academic works, but also: watch television; listen to music; read novels; hear from low-income residents in Charlottesville and South Africa as well as affordable housing providers; examine and depict our own domestic spaces; and leave the UVA campus to turn the city of Charlottesville into our classroom.
As with other Engagements classes, the housing cohort will orient you to university study while allowing you to develop a community of peers. What’s unique about the cohort experience, though, is that you’ll be with the same group of 35 students throughout the whole year. This offers you a unique opportunity not only to delve deep into a topic in your Engagements, but also provides the chance to create community and friendships with your peers over all four quarters.
As part of the unique cohort experience, you will also get the opportunity to go on a field trip, where we’ll spend a day in Charlottesville exploring homes and housing in our own backyards, and learning from various community members along the way. (You’ll also get to experience some of our local cuisine on the trip!)
To participate in the Housing Cohort experience, you are committing to being with the same group of students and faculty for all four quarters of your engagements. In return, you’ll get to: participate in a host of unique activities, learn a lot about housing, and make friends that you’ll have for the rest of your time at UVA.
If you’re interested in being in the Housing Cohort in the Engagements, please write a response to the following question:
For the last several decades, people have expressed concern over the “housing crisis” in many countries across the globe. What do you think the housing crisis is? What does it mean to you?
Courses
Empirical Engagement: What Is Public Housing?
Gillet Rosenblith
Many people have a clear image that comes to mind when they think about public housing in the United States. These ideas are often informed by the fact that over the last 60-plus years, public housing in the U.S. has regularly been described by politicians, policymakers, journalists, scholars, and creators of popular culture as something broken to the point of being almost (if not entirely) irredeemable. In this class, we’ll develop our own understanding of public housing. To do so, we will evaluate various types of evidence about public housing. We will look at evidence about public housing generated by housing administrators, legislation, politicians, television shows, musicians, and finally, by public housing residents themselves. As we examine these forms of evidence, we will consider how the creator of the evidence and the moment in which it was made shapes what it says about both public housing and to what end. By the end of the course, we will assess what public housing is and whether the general consensus around public housing in the U.S. rings true in light of the evidence we have considered.
Engaging Differences: The Slums
Claire Wrigley
Poor neighborhoods of the world’s great cities – New York, London, Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, Johannesburg, Paris, Los Angeles, Kinshasa, Hong Kong – have long been labeled ‘slums’: places of misery, hopelessness, despair, failure. Yet they have also been seen as transgressive, exciting, liberatory, innovative, and joyful. How can these two things exist side by side? In this class we will follow the rise of a global discourse of ‘the slums’, exploring how it evolved alongside capitalism, empire, mass migration, and, ultimately, modernity. We will see how designating different places as ‘slums’ has functioned as a powerful tool to mark certain people, their families, and their homes as different, deviant, and abnormal. Yet, even as we examine what gets called a slum, by whom, and why, we will see how the people who live in these spaces have resisted, reclaimed, and repurposed the term, and the spaces they live in, offering new ways to think about ‘the good life.’ Engaging with scholarly research, investigative journalism, fiction, photograph, and film, we will examine the rise of ‘the slum’ in industrial, capitalist, globalized society from the nineteenth century to today.
Aesthetic Engagement: House, Home, Shelter: The Architecture and Aesthetics of Living
Ben Jameson-Ellsmore
In this course, we will examine the aesthetics, architecture, and materiality of the places that humans call home. We will distinguish between “home” and “house” to explore the nature of housing throughout history (including our contemporary housing crises), and open our minds to different modes of belonging, dwelling, and being at home, even in the most basic of shelters. We will explore a range of experiences of dwelling and home, from pillow forts and encampments to dormitories and the houses designed by famous architects. We will focus on how they are each organized spatially and sensorially, and how they are decorated and shaped by their occupants.
The course understands aesthetics as the study of the elements of our world that we sense and perceive, and how they are distributed and designed. In class, we will examine architectural plans and photos of apartments, houses, and housing patterns around the globe, while comparing them with more informal dwellings like shanties, trailer parks, and mobile settlements to discern what they have in common aesthetically. Students will use this material to explore the places they have called home, from traditional houses and apartments to dormitories. Assignments will require students to record, depict, and measure spaces to produce architectural floor plans of various homes, including the ones they live in now, the ones they hope to live in, and the ones they hope not to.
Ethical Engagement: Housing Is a Human Right.
Laura Goldblatt
Course description: In 1948, the United Nations drafted and adopted their “Universal Declaration on Human Rights”--a policy document that established what they considered to be universal human rights to be protected and cultivated in all nations. Article 25 of that declaration delineates what standards of living all humans have a right to, insisting that healthful and secure housing is a universal human right.
This class will use the 1948 “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” as its starting point, using the right to stable, adequate, and safe housing as a lens to examine the ethical dimensions of the housing crisis. To do so, we will begin by querying the category of human rights–who or what counts as human?–before analyzing the various ethical and political cases scholars, activists, and community members have made for deeply affordable housing as well as the ways free market advocates have pushed back on these arguments. We will also hear from low-income housing residents and activists in Charlottesville and Cape Town, South Africa to consider shared sources and solutions to housing instability. In each class, we will consider whether we have an ethical obligation to ensure suitable housing for all people across the world–and how such an obligation could even be met.