Concrete Dreams: Urban Infrastructure and the Regulation of Human Behavior in the Global Twentieth Century

Co-sponsored by GHI Washington, USC Dana David Dornsife College of Letters, and USC Dornsife Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life

This workshop explores the history of attempts to influence human behavior through interventions in urban infrastructure in Europe, the United States, and beyond in the twentieth century. It seeks to understand how the built environment and architecture regulated life and behavior through choices in form, size, material, or color. The papers will focus on how psychologists, architects, designers, planners, geographers, sociologists, and ordinary people directed and continue to direct people’s behaviors and social relations. They aim also to create dialogue between scholars who work on the study of infrastructure in different times and places across the global twentieth century.