History and Environment of Davis: The College Town Context of UCD at 100
Instructor: Dennis Dingemans, Social Sciences Program, College of Letters & Science
Description: This course makes students more familiar with the history, heritage, and environmental setting of the city of Davis as the supportive home of one of the nation’s great public universities (UCD) as it celebrates its centennial (in 2006-07-08). The first goal is a variation on the principle that we should all become more knowledgeable about our surroundings. The second goal is to become familiar with the ways that scholars study local history and local geography. Historians and geographers have a tradition of doing “local area studies” and this course will review work with the Davis Area as the subject. Third, students will be asked to reflect on four identities that comprise much of the Davis-Area’s sense of place: 1) Davis as a small town with roots as a railroad-centered service center for a surrounding agricultural community; 2) Davis as an “American College Town,” one of 135 such places that the scholars Blake Gumprecht and Richard Florida have identified as distinctive and unusually creative places; 3) Davis as a “progressive” community with innovative liberal social and growth control policies; and 4) Davis as an “ordinary residential suburb” serving the Sacramento area and (increasingly) Northern California and even the nation (as a retirement housing area and concentration of home-based employment).
Format: Required is a book by UCD Sociologist, John Lofland: Davis: Radical Changes, Deep Constants (Arcadia Publications: 2004). Grading: For 50% of the grade, students are expected to be alert participants in a majority of the 5 class meeting dates. For 50% of the class grade, students turn in (by Oct. 31st) two 2-page short reports: these summarize and comment upon two of the four “Davis Identities/Themes” as they appear in the Lofland book and in at least one of the optional class field trips (note: several of these are self guided).
About the Instructor: Professor Emeritus Dingemans received his undergraduate degree (BA in Modern European History) at the University of Chicago in 1968 and then his graduate degrees (MA & PhD, in 1975, in Geography) at the University of California at Berkeley where his coursework and dissertation focused on the densification of California’s suburban housing since 1960. He has traveled widely and taught regional geography courses at UCD from 1972 to 2006. During recent (2000 to 2007) years he completed his 7th year on the Davis (city) Planning Commission and has continued to be a frequent contributor to local history organizations, local politics, and local planning debates.