List ideas for Project 3 below. Most pertain to more than one author.

Davis:

• Look at how architecture enforces behaviors, classes, races, etc. in your own environments.
• How do depictions of urban space like Davis's compare to popular representations (such as those in Escape from New York, Escape from LA, Metropolis, and Blade Runner)? What about contrasting representations, like that of Sex and the City?

Lippard:

• A map is simply a model used to get certain information about an environment. Think about how environments are "mapped." What are the different ways you could map your environment?
• What gets shown on the campus tour? What would a tour lead by students for students look like? What accounts for the difference?
• Today many Americans live neither in the country nor the city, but in the suburb. Consider your perceptions of how Lippard depicts the mythologies of the city and the country and compose an essay that analyzes the mythology of the suburb.
• Consider the major landmarks in your environment. What are their functions? What messages do they send? How do they impose a particular kind of order (governmental, religious, cultural). Think of the colosseum. Think of a town that has a bunch of confederate flags hanging. What messages do these features send?
• Consider Wilson's claim: "We might even go so far as to claim that urban life is actually based on this perpetual struggle between rigid rountinized order and pleasurable anarchy, the male-female dichotomy" (qtd. in Lippard 429). How is the interplay of urban and rural spaces associated with gender?

Gibian:

• Using Gibian's text as a framework, examine a local shopping center contrasted to one from an urban area. What do their similarities and differences imply?
• How does architecture relate to consumerism? What encourages buying and what discourages it?
• A paper that discusses how the environment effects emotions and how emotions affect buying.
• A paper that examines other sensory appeals than the visual in shopping centers (smells, sounds, etc.).
• Compare and contrast malls that you would find in college towns to those found in upscale or economically depressed areas. How do they show what type of people live in that area?

Fiske:

• How do people resist different architectures of control? Mallrats exert a kind of trickery to use a commercial space without purchasing anything. How do people resist the kinds of control in Davis's depiction of the city?
• How is consumer resistance, like that of Fiske's teenagers, illusory?
• What are the negatives associated with subversive use of shared space?
• How does the presence of a mall in a community define or reflect the people that live in the surrounding area?
• How and why do stores court youth consumers? How and why do they thwart them?
• How are shared spaces used differently by different age, race, or socioeconomic groups? What do these various uses imply?
• What are the implications of community-use spaces shifting from the public to the private sphere?

McCarthy:

• In what ways is commerce like a religion? In what ways is it different? What does this imply about religion, commerce, groups, culture, the nation, or other entities?
• How do stores make personal appeals to customers to increase consumerism?
• How do consumer brands like Nike sort people into different groups?
• How do stores use physical space not to sell products but to establish the prevalence of a brand?
• NikeTown uses athletes to construct an ideal and invites the customer to identify with this image through commerce. In what ways are other stores selling customers the opportunity to vicariously participate in a lifestyle rather than own a product?

Staples:

• How do the people occupying your surroundings change the identity of space?
• How does racial stereotyping and prejudice limit the places that some people are allowed?
• Why are you immediately categorized under a certain group just because of your appearance?
• How does the enviorment in which different races are in reflect on how they are viewed?
• A paper on how much a person’s space is invaded by the color of their skin.

Swentzell:

• Why does outside influence have such a dramatic affect on certain cultures?

Spain:

• Are work places designed to hold back women and help men get ahead?
• How gender will shape the identity of someone raised or living im certain places such as work, home or school.
• Women’s potential in the workforce is limited. What can be done to help give equal rights to both women and men in the workplace?