Course Meeting Times
Lectures/discussions: 1 session/week, 3 hours/session
Prerequisites
11.001J Introduction to Urban Design and Development, 11.301J Introduction to Urban Design and Development, or permission of instructor
Course Description
Whether planned or unplanned, guided by theory or by “organic growth,” making cities is one of the biggest and most consistent of all collective human enterprises. Cities’ societal and demographic importance is today immense, driven by a relentless process of urbanization. Our chief interest is in understanding this urban process, by looking to the history of how major cities and urban systems are made, remade, and at points have become “unmade.”
The class will be structured around four key debates: 1) the city and the urban, 2) spatial forms of the political, 3) world systems and urban economies, and 4) environmentalism. We will analyze these topics both cross-historically and cross-geographically, consistently moving between historical and contemporary urban formations. These studies will allow us to interrogate, analyze, and differentiate the links between historic and contemporary urban forms. The class will explore these four questions by examining the various artifacts and mechanisms that make up the urban environment (infrastructures, buildings, plans) and the spatial structures they generate.
Our study of cities builds upon three main theoretical assumptions. The first thesis insists on the singularity of each urban form as a specific way of articulating socio-spatial relations. Every case we will consider represents a particular attempt to explore how humans (and often also non-humans) can live together. Even if we will explore the historical continuities or relations between different city forms, our focus will be on detecting the singularities, the unique contributions that each city represents. Throughout history, city building has been a tremendously imaginative enterprise, characterized by changes and drastic discontinuities in what different social groups considered a city was. Acknowledging that richness is a way of keep imagining what cities can be.
The second is that cities and urban systems can only be properly understood when considered territorially. That is, even if the city and the non-city realms have been historically differentiated in contrasting categories (such as urban/rural, or urban/hinterland), these different realms have always maintained a constant interplay. Cities help articulating broader territorial systems, and in turn their functional, formal, and social conditions result from the regime of relations between the urban and non-urban dimensions characterizing that territory. Treating cities and territories as co-constitutive elements allows us better understanding of which types of functions, buildings, and structures a particular city form contains. It also helps us to analyze the relation between cities and material, energetic, and ecological flows, and the challenges these factors imposed on the persistence of urban systems.
Our final thesis is that learning about cities requires both considering systemic factors (environmental, material, or economic force) but also the consequence of specific decisions and interventions, carried out by agents who contribute to shaping urban space. Cities are the object of actions of (often privileged) social or political groups. They are the realm of intervention of particular domains of knowledge and disciplines. Our analyses will insist on the importance of those agents in order to highlight that every city has been the result of choices, and that these choices both entail and give form to a vision of social relations.
Course Format
Most classes will consist of two parts. The first part will be a lecture examining targeted cities throughout history and across the globe. The lectures will draw attention to the forces that have shaped urban form, providing an historical account integrated together with an analysis of various physical changes that have taken place in the city. As such the lectures aid in establishing a conceptual-analytic framework for how to approach, understand, and make use of information and data that concerns urban form. The second part of the class will be a student-led reading discussion. The goal of the discussion is to better unpack the concepts treated in the lecture, and to build bridges between those concepts and some of our contemporary urban questions.
Student participation is a crucial component of the course. Participants in the class will divide themselves in groups. Each of these groups will be responsible for leading one reading discussion. In addition, students will work individually on a semester-long research project, to be presented in our last class. This research project must focus on a particular, existing urban artifact (a building, an urban area, an infrastructure) in order to illuminate how it was produced, what type of urban condition it enables, and what is its potential value for your own way of thinking about urbanism. Additionally, every student should actively participate in the reading discussions.
Outside of classroom hours, students should expect to devote time to reading texts, preparing their in-class presentations and their semester long research project, and attending the meetings with the TAs to develop the project.
Course Requirements and Grading
The course contains several, interrelated assignments. The intention is that you will build your work sequentially, interrelating your participation in class, with your research, with the dialogue with your peers.
Attendance, participation, and leading of reading discussions (total 50%)
On the first day of class, you must bring an image of an urban element, and briefly explain in 2 minutes why it is important to you.
As an individual, you are expected to come to every class with thoughtful questions and well-reasoned arguments based upon the assigned readings, and to participate fully in the discussion. Every Tuesday before class, you must upload the following to the class website:
- a key question you’d like to address in the conversation
- a paragraph from each text that you find important to discuss in relation to your question.
As a member of a group, you are expected to present the readings assigned to your group, structuring and leading the conversations about them. This last conversation must be prepared with the class TAs.
In the class we all learn through mutual dialogue. As such, attendance in class is mandatory, and your participation mark will be impacted if you fail to actively participate in class.
Absences to the class should be notified, although we understand that in emergency cases that may not be possible. Please note that more than one unexcused absence will lower your final grade by one grade (e.g., A to A-, C- to C+). In turn, greater than two absences from class without medical excuse supported by a doctor’s note or verifiable personal emergency could result in a failing grade or a NE for the course. Finally, those missing more than 3 classes during the semester will receive a fail or NE. Persistent lateness will also contribute to a lowered grade for participation.
A final note relates to the class no-screen request. While this is hard for all of us in a connected and digital age, it substantially improves the focus and quality of our discussions, and the work that results from them. If you find yourself truly needing to respond to a call or other phone-related emergency, please feel free to do so but leave the classroom quietly.
Semester-long research project (total 50%)
Every student will develop a semester-long research project. In this exercise you need to select an urban artifact (a building, a neighborhood, a street, an infrastructure) that you can approach as a historian. This artifact must have been built, even if it has disappeared since its original construction. Then, your work should illuminate at least three things: 1) how this element was produced and what is its relation to the history of the area where it is located; 2) what conditions this urban element has enabled or enables; and 3) why it is important and we should be looking at it today.
The final format of the project is a pdf booklet with a 3,000 words text, properly referenced and sourced, plus six visualizations of your own making. The instructors will provide an InDesign template for the pdf. The students will present their project the last day of class. The visualizations must be printed independently in a tabloid paper.
The project will be developed sequentially and debated with the instructors during office hours. We will organize your topics thematically so that you can always develop your work in conversation with your peers. The idea is that we will be able to discuss urban topics collaboratively.
For more details on the timeline for the research project, see the Research Project page.
