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Class of 2022
My name is Karson Hegrenes, and I am a Geography major with an Urban Studies concentration from Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
My journey into Urban Studies started at a young age, when I found myself fascinated by cities. As a child, I would doodle imaginary city grids in my notebooks during study hall. I pored over the maps in my social studies textbooks to memorize all the cities. Though I grew up in fairly suburban areas in Wisconsin and Minnesota, I was fortunate enough to experience many large cities throughout my youth. Before coming to Macalester, I had spent time exploring cities like Chicago, Milwaukee, Madison, Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Atlanta, Denver, and Phoenix. I was captivated by these bustling marvels of human civilization that yielded lifestyles so vastly different from those of the quiet communities I had known back home. I was transfixed by how so much chaos and order could coexist in these environments.
Over the course of four years at Macalester College, I have put this fascination toward coursework in Urban Studies. Throughout the classes I have explored in the discipline, I have encountered three themes that I feel are salient and continue to drive my interest in Urban Studies. These themes are:
Sense of Place - Immersing oneself in the city environment, reading the landscape, noticing patterns, and taking in the ambiance. How do the geographic characteristics of a place imbue that place with meaning? What can we gauge from a place just from spending a brief period of time there?
Urban Injustices - The various ways in which certain city populations are deprived of a resource, outcome, or end; the ways in which the playing field is not level between racial, economic, and/or social groups in cities.
Cities as Machines - The economic, social, and political processes, sometimes overt and sometimes covert, that occur in cities and drive certain outcomes like development and displacement.
A series of photos I have taken of urban environments throughout my life:
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