Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Examination of the thought of key urban thinkers who have defined the field of urban studies, drawing from architecture, planning, sociology, history, anthropology, political science, public policy, and geography.

COURSE DETAILS:

This course is designed to introduce graduate Urban Studies students to the history and evolution of the interdisciplinary field of urban studies through examining the thought of some of the key urban thinkers who have defined the field of study. In so doing, the course will also acquaint students with the city as an object of study, reflection, and positive action. The scholarly disciplines from which we draw in this overview of great urban thinkers include architecture, planning, sociology, history, anthropology, political science, public policy, and geography. While the course will focus primarily on the canon of the 20th and 21st centuries, the first part of the course will contain a deeper historical treatment. The course content is selected to examine the scope -- the depth and breadth -- of urban studies in this way. It does not offer a comprehensive or ideologically coherent set of great urbanists who have influenced the physical, spatial and social systems of our cities; it offers a partial, subjective, heterodox set of thinkers and thinking that have shaped and continue to drive and divide contemporary urban discourses.

Through interrogation of the work of different great urbanists, the course will address a variety of questions, including: What is a city? How did cities develop? How do cities function socially, politically, economically, and ecologically? Why do cities attract people and how do cities change people and our interactions? What are some of the “big ideas” that different scholars have put forward to reveal the degree to which cities function effectively and efficiently, serve the needs of their inhabitants, and
improve urban life? By introducing the field of urban studies through some of its most vibrant, committed, and productive devotees, we will offer a personable, nuanced and contextualized entry point to the field for you, the next generation of urbanists.

Course Themes

Garden Cities and the City Beautiful

The High Modernist City: Le Corbusier

Urbanism as a Way of Life: Louis Wirth

Urban Economic Advantages: Molotch and Logan

The Death and Life of Great American Cities: Jane Jacobs

Social Justice in the City: David Harvey

Great Thinkers on Urban Insurgency

Uneven Urban Development

Great Thiners in Urban Renewal and Revitalization

Great Urban Form

Great Thinkers in Urban Social Life and Urban Design

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

Students in this course will learn to:

· approach the study of cities from a number of disciplines, not only through the readings but through discussions and their own observations and research in the course’s written assignments;

· examine the city as an expression of physical, social and spatial systems that have evolved over time.

· navigate the scope of 20th and 21st Century urban thinking in different scholarly disciplines, and recognize the bridges between this thinking and different types of urban professional practice;

· summarize, compare, and critique the thought of some of the English speaking world’s major urban thinkers; and to do this by juxtaposing different urban thinkers against one another;

· express the views of contemporary urban political, economic, social, environmental, and cultural leaders in terms of their debt to scholarly urban thinking and writing.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: