This course will examine the role that place can play in understanding our multiple crises and supporting community organizing. Through readings, field trips, films, and guest speakers students will explore the intersection of space and social justice and engage with what it means to work through the lens of spatial justice. This course will explore questions that include: What are the ways justice and injustice are played out in the visible and invisible structural arrangements of space? How does understanding the many histories of our places support our community organizing? What forces are causing our neighborhoods and cities to be reorganized? How are our demands for justice strengthened when we incorporate place-based organizing strategies? Students will be grounded in a history of urban planning policy, dive into case studies of community organizing and analyze the forces shaping their neighborhoods today. Through independent projects and group work students will have the opportunity to carefully observe and learn more about the places that shaped them and that they are shaping.