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This third class project is a little more open-ended. Your task is to 1) choose a topic that will enable you to think about what would make a better place to live or a better way of living, and 2) develop your topic to showcase your own ideas about how we Americans might best design or organize our homes, families, lives, and communities in the twenty-first century. This project provides an opportunity to apply your knowledge of what has worked and what doesn't work in suburbia to conceptualize a better way of living.
The goal of this project is to develop one large interactive Web site that harnesses each person's knowledge and ideals and expertise to figuring out a) what's right and what's wrong with suburbia, b) how we want to live in the century to come, and c) how to create better places/ways of living than we have now. No one person's project is likely to provide the authoritative answer, but each project can contribute to our thinking about and imagining a better way to live, and all the projects combined together will stimulate deeper thinking on this issue and showcase a broader range of alternative solutions. Your hypertext links to other student projects (minimum required: 3) will help to knit the whole site together.
A good way to begin thinking about your project would be to focus on American suburbia and identify 1) what facets of suburbia are working well, and 2) what most needs to be improved. An alternative approach might be to imagine all the components of your ideal community or way of living. Still another starting point would be to identify and analyze a different residential form (a cosmopolitan urban neighborhood or the American small town, say) that works better than suburbia. From any of these points, you can pursue the project from a number of different perspectives:
* study a real community or community type in the past or present time to analyze how it addresses the problems you've identified or realizes the components you think are essential to good living
* study an "ideal community" imagined by someone else--an actual community like Arcosanti, or an architectural project (never built) like Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacres City or Ebenezer Howard's garden cities, or a fictional utopia (Shangri-la) or dystopia (Walden Two)--for ideas about what to do and what not to do.
* investigate housing or community alternatives that people are experimenting with today: communes, co-housing, simple living, neo-traditional communities, retirement communities, gated communities, revitalized urban neighborhoods, and others
* imagine and or design your own ideal community--make your project a thought piece toward a better way of living
* focus on one component of the solution--achieving harmonious racially and ethnically diverse neighborhoods, say, or affordable low-income housing, or non-sexist housing designs, or housing designs that promote more constructive family interaction--and investigate ways of addressing it.
* focus on one or more components of the context in which we'll have to work out our solutions-- peoples' preference for single-family homes or driving their own cars everywhere, the computer and telecommunications revolution, attitudes toward the environment, gender role expectations, racism, materialism, conceptions about the normal American family--and suggest ways of dealing with them.
Feel free to develop collaborative projects, but remember that collaborative projects need to be proportionally larger or more complex, according to the number of collaborators. This project is explicitly designed to encourage imaginative and unusual project ideas.
1. Care, precision, and imagination with which you frame the issue(s) and substantive analysis of the issues you choose to focus on regarding how to conceptualize a better place to live.
2. Quality and resourcefulness of your research and use of sources.
3. Quality of your argument: are your conclusions well reasoned and well supported?
4. Quality of your writing: do you express your ideas clearly and in an organized manner? Is your writing technically correct?
5. Quality of your html formatting; is your project well presented, and easy to navigate?
6. Quality of your hypertext links to other student projects.