Engineering Justice and the City: Technologies, Environments, and Power
Princeton University, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Spring 2022
From highways that bulldozed through predominantly Black neighborhoods in New York City to aqueducts that wrest water from indigenous farmers for Mexico City’s wealthy enclaves, engineers have long played a crucial role in etching inequality into both cities and their rural hinterlands, all in the name of the “public good.” This course investigates this history and the contemporary politics of engineering while asking a fundamental question: how do we engineer just cities?
With its grounding in the natural sciences and mathematics, engineering design is often assumed to be a neutral practice. Given constraints, engineers find the objectively best solution to the problem they are given. In this course, we ask where these constraints and problems come from, who reaps the benefits of engineering solutions, and whether we can truly make claims to objectivity in engineering practice. As we will learn, urban infrastructures and technologies hailed as revolutionary advances by some segments of the population have often been seen as crushing setbacks by others.
This course is an opportunity to reimagine engineering as a liberatory and collective practice that challenges – rather than reinforces – systems of domination, inequality, and environmental exploitation in cities. Interdisciplinary readings will examine how social and environmental injustices in cities have been produced or reinforced through engineering designs while also exploring new frameworks for designing just cities. Students will then put these frameworks into practice by participating in a conceptual design studio, focused on designing interventions that undermine the ability of the powerful to exploit both humans and the environment.
This class is intended to bring together students interested in urban environments and design from across disciplines, from the humanities and architecture to engineering. This interdisciplinarity is crucial given that understanding the relationship between engineering and justice in cities requires not only engineering analysis, both also the open-ended forms of inquiry and critique that humanists offer as and the imaginative practices of planners and architects.