Spring 2021

H+U+D ANCHOR INSTITUTION SEMINAR

Description:

The Inclusive City: Participatory Design at Taller Puertorriqueño seminar will provide students across various fields with the opportunity to learn from and with Taller Puertorriqueño about community, spacemaking, and memorialization in the built environment. Supported by the University of Pennsylvania’s Humanities+Urbanism+Design (H+U+D) Initiative, the course is offered in collaboration with Taller Puertorriqueño as a vehicle to explore and examine Philadelphia as a laboratory for the study of diversity, equality and inclusion. Taller, the 2020-2021 H+U+D anchor institution, is a community-based cultural organization whose primary purpose is to preserve, develop and promote Puerto Rican arts and culture in the City of Philadelphia.

Centered on the Fairhill neighborhood, The Inclusive City seminar will focus on a North Philadelphia Puerto Rican community’s efforts to tell its own history through the built environment. Through our engagements in the community, students will develop methodological skills, including neighborhood mapping, engaging primary sources in the Taller archives, and participating in a community charette. As a truly interdisciplinary course, students will utilize design concepts, historical methods, and ethnoracial lenses of analysis throughout the semester. Drawing on these theoretical and methodological approaches, students will produce sustainable, community-informed design plans that align with Taller’s programmatic goals.

Instructors:

Daniel Morales-Armstrong, Africana Studies (School of Arts and Sciences); in partnership with Taller Puertorriqueño