The Global Urban Humanities Initiative:Engaging the humanities and environmental design in pedagogical innovation

A new initiative to better integrate methods and theories from the humanities with those from the fields of environmental design is being launched at the University of California, Berkeley. The project, known as the Global Urban Humanities Initiative, will bring faculty, graduate students, practitioners and critics together over three years through a series of methods workshops, theory courses, and research studios examining three Pacific Rim cities. This article examines the history of the interaction of the humanities, social science and design and planning disciplines in teaching and practice and describes the pedagogical and research experiments planned for the project.