LA Tech City: Digital Technologies and Spatial Justice

Fall 2017. UCLA Humanities

DGT HUM 30

LA Tech City: Digital Technologies and Spatial Justice

University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA)

* Lower Division Undergraduate 

* General Education Course, Foundation Society and Culture - Social Analysis

* Diversity Course, College of Letters and Science, and School of Music  

Course Description

The intersections between richly diverse cities and spatial technologies are evolving in increasingly significant and creative directions. The next generation of students must be intellectually, meaningfully, and technologically prepared to address complex issues arising within daily cosmopolitan life. “LA Tech City” brings together urban studies, architecture, and the humanities in a hands-on engagement with digital technologies and spatial justice in the city. Innovative forms of investigation and communication, from digital mapping to filmic sensing, integrate the interpretive and historical approaches of the humanities with the material, projective practices of design. The course explores creative techniques to study, intervene, and speculate on subject matters that can best be understood by connecting forms of spatial analysis to humanist considerations in Los Angeles.

Students will investigate spatial justice and injustice in the multi-ethnic city through the lens of three thematic technologies that have literally built and transformed LA into a global metropolis: cars and highways; networking technologies culminating in the internet and World Wide Web; and film and broadcast media. Through seminars, critical readings, fieldwork, and applied projects, students explore new ways to understand, describe, and speculate research findings related to social stratifications, racial and ethnic complexity, and unequal access to information, technology, as well as housing and urban space.  

Final Projects  Documentary Shorts