Week 1: Class Presentation
Presentation of the class contents and structure; introduction of the teaching team and students; submit an image to accompany your presentation
Week 2: The Origins of Cities
Readings:
- Graeber and Wengrow, “Imaginary Cities"
- Mumford, “The Crystallization of the City”
- Secchi, “A New Urban Question 3”
- Varzi, “What Is a City?”
Week 3
Part 1. Lecture: Metropolitanization and urban science; 19th century Barcelona
Part 2. Student presentation of readings and discussion
Readings:
- Boyer, “The City as a Machine”
- Doxiadis, “Anthropocosmos Model”
- Adams, “Natura Urbans, Natura Urbanata”
- Sevilla-Buitrago, “Planning as a Historical Project”
Week 4
Part 1. Guest lecture (Angelo Bucci)
Part 2. Student presentations of research topics
Week 5: Workshop
Week 6
Part 1. Lecture: Polis and demos; the autonomous Greek city
Part 2. Student presentation of readings and discussion
Readings:
- Aristotle, Politics. Book 7, chapters 4 to 7
- Kitto, “The Polis”
- Wood, “The Polis and the Peasant Citizen”
- Sennet, “The Spaces of Democracy”
- Castoriadis, “The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy”
Week 7
Part 1. Lecture: Urbs, civitas, empire; Roman urbanism
Part 2. Student presentation of readings and discussion
Readings:
- Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture
- Norberg-Schulz, Meaning in Western Architecture or Benevolo, “Roman Urbanism”
- Rossi, “The Roman Forum” and “Monuments”
- Rowe, “Collision City and the Politics of Bricolage”
- Cacciari, “The Myth of the Growing City”
- Benevolo, The Origins of Modern Town Planning on Roman urbanism
Week 8: No Class (Spring Break)
Week 9
Part 1. Lecture: Commerce and utopia; cities in the Hanseatic League and the Italian Renaissance
Part 2. Student presentation of readings and discussion
Readings:
- More, Utopia (excerpts)
- de Landa, ”Geological History 1000-1700”
- Ong, “Worldling Cities, or the Art of Being Global”
- Sassen, “Medieval City-States and Economic Networks”
- Ogilvie, “Guilds, Cities, and Trade”
Week 10
Part 1. Lecture: What is it to “have” a continent? City building and the colonization of America
Part 2. Student presentation of readings and discussion
Readings:
- De Bruijne, “Colonial Cities and the Post-Colonial World”
- Easterling, “Zone”
- Sheppard, Leitner, and Maringanti, “Provincializing Global Urbanism”
- Mbembe and Nuttall, “Writing the World from an African Metropolis”
- Kipfer, “Mixing It Up”
Week 11
Part 1. Guest lecture (Huma Gupta)
Part 2. Presentation of research topics, in groups
Week 12: Workshop 2
Week 13: Remote session
Part 1. Lecture: The medicalization of the city; 18th- and 19th-century Paris
Part 2. Student presentation of readings and discussion
Readings:
- Picon, “Nineteenth-Century Urban Cartography and the Scientific Ideal”
- Gandy, “Rethinking Urban Metabolism”
- Barles, “The Nitrogen Question”
- Sevilla-Buitrago, “Gramsci and Foucault in Central Park”
- Mattern, “Urban Technologies”
- Batty, “The Unpredictable City”
Week 14
Part 1. Guest lecture and discussion (Jack Hanley)
Part 2. Questions on research with TAs
