Three main tasks:

1. Read texts carefully and come to class ready to discuss and engage.
2. Sign up for at least 2 Presentations (and upload reading guides to the google site several days before the session's date).
3. Write three short essays.
4. Short presentation on the final day of class (see below)

The Details:

1. The Readings (see syllabus).

2. Short Presentations & Writing of a Critical "Reading Guide" (in groups of 2-3 students per session)

(a) Early in the semester: Form presentation groups for each week. (Ideally each week should have two volunteers; however, depending on class size, several sessions may have 1-3 volunteers). Each student should select 2 sessions (though you are welcome to do a third). Write your name on the next to the weeks you select on the google site . Please review the syllabus and identify several weeks of interest, and talk to classmates about forming teams for a particular week. [Note: you are welcome to suggest additional or alternative readings for your session.. Just be sure to do this at least 1-2 weeks ahead of time, allowing time for the instructor to upload the readings to Canvas and/or eBooks.

(b) By TUESDAY of your week: Write and upload a critical "reading guide" to the google site. (viewable by the world).
(Suggested length: 8 - 12 paragraphs; graphics and links encouraged). The students in each group should write a single, integrated text. Be concise: do NOT simply summarize the readings, but instead provide insights, frameworks and distinctions that will be useful to your classmates as they read the texts. [This will require you to do your reading AHEAD of time, so plan accordingly.] You may include links to other sites where useful. Of course, do cite sources (and acknowledge use of quotes and ideas) where appropriate.

(c) Friday's Class: Start the class with a brief presentation (15-25 minutes) that illustrates the key themes, controversies, big questions of the week's readings. Creativity and engagement encouraged. [Note: this presentation may highlight elements from your emailed "reading guide," but your presentation should NOT simply be a retelling of your "reading guide." The classroom has digital monitor.

3. Short Essays
Throughout the semester, students will write several short essays that will be closely linked to the readings. Use double-spaced pages, and include a bibliography.   Be concise, analytical, precise and reflective. Guidelines on correct citations.

Essay One (Foundational Readings)
due: Wednesday Oct 19 (end of day) [date updated]

Answer one of the following questions.  Where appropriate, cite course readings.   You are encouraged to examine connections and leitmotifs across the readings.  However, you need not analyze ALL readings from the first weeks of class.  Instead, you may find it useful to focus on several selected readings.

1. From Berlin to Chicago: We began by reading the German school, followed by the Chicago School. You might see continuities from the German School to the Chicago School. You might also see differences, reinterpretations, shifts in focus, or even no similarities at all. In your essay, select several representative essays from each school and contrast their respective views of cities and urbanization.  To focus your essay, select several aspects for comparison (examples include -- but are not limited to: the main questions posed, their underlying assumptions and biases, their emphasis on city-as-experience versus city-as-process, their methodological and theoretical approaches to the city, their units/scale of analysis, etc).   Note:  remember to interpret the concept of "school" loosely and not monolithically: there is, understandably, a range of approaches found within each school.

2. City Love / City Fear:  The authors' stances towards urbanism and city life express a wide range of perspectives: great promises and excitement of urban life, but also great dangers and despair.  Some express a nostalgia for the rural "world we have lost," while others reveal a modernist zeal for all things new and a hope that cities offer new possibilities for human development.  (Lewis Mumford seems to alternately express both hope and doom, and he is likely not the only one expressing deep ambivalence.)  In your essay, select several texts and explore the strands of pro- and anti-urbanism in the texts.  What are their reasons for their divergent views of city life?

3. Tracing urban planning's worldview back to urban sociology? A generation or several ago, it was common for students in US urban planning graduate programs to read texts from the Chicago School. Examine the influence of the Chicago school (and/or German school) on urban planning. Can you identify assumptions, biases, priorities or uses of terminology in urban planning that have a direct lineage back to these sociological writings on cities? For example, what might the connection be between the early mapping of social segmentation (e.g., the Burgess concentric zone model) and 20th century zoning practices? Or between social science models of urban expansion and succession and planning policies to address urban growth, redevelopment and gentrification? Overall, can you see links between tools of analysis and tools of implementation/design/planning? (Note: it is an open question of whether the Chicago and German schools actually had a strong influence on planning -- or if their influence is overstated. Perhaps urban planners, in search of an intellectual history and theoretical grounding for their young field, looked around and conveniently found the Chicago School. I encourage you to both search for connections between early urban sociology and the rise of urban planning and also critically question this direct lineage.)

4. David Harvey and the restlessness of capitalist urban landscapes: “Part of the dynamic of capitalist accumulation is the necessity to build whole landscapes only to tear them down and build anew in the future” (Harvey, Spaces of Capital, 76). “The built environment internalizes within it the contradictory relations inherent in the accumulation of capital” (ibid, 82). “The inner contradictions of capitalism are expressed through the restless formation and re-formation of geographic landscapes. This is the tune to which the historical geography of capitalism must dance without cease” (ibid, 333).
In these and other passages, Harvey repeatedly speaks about the restlessness and contradictions — the ceaseless building-up and tearing down, of creating and destroying value, of placemaking and place-abandoning — not only of capitalism, but also of urbanization. (This contrasts with a view of urbanization as moving steadily towards an optimal steady state/equilibrium of land use.) In your essay, explore why and how Harvey comes to this conclusion about the volatile nature of urbanization. Then select one or more stakeholders/actors/interest groups in the city (e.g., architects, city planners, real estate agents, developers, mayors, city council, etc.) and explore the implications for this group.

Essay Two
due: Sunday Nov 27 (end of day) [updated]

Answer one of the following questions.   Cite all sources and put all borrowed text in quotes. (see above link about citation guidelines.)

1. Why the Marxist Foundation for Several Urban Theorists? Several authors of course readings have employed or adapted Marxist analysis.  What do you make of this Marxist thread to many of these urban theory writings?  (And is the common thread an emphasis on the dynamics of accumulation? capital-labor conflicts? Hegelian dialectics? relationship to the means of production? an emphasis on systemic contradictions and crises? etc.) Discuss the analytical power and drawbacks that arise from using Marxist ideas to construct urban theory.  (Use one or more of the course authors as examples.) Also, if the popularity of asserting overtly Marxist-based political-economic agendas has waned since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 (and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the transition of China away from traditional communism), how has the credibility and veracity of a Marxist-based urban theory changed?  (Optional: What are compelling non-Marxist theoretical foundations for progressive, emancipatory thinking? That is, what are the prospects of a systematic, rigorous theoretical critique of contemporary urbanism that are not rooted in Marx’s political economy?)

2. The Influence of Lefebvre: Henri Lefebvre (1901 – 1991) introduces a distinctive approach to understanding "space" (e.g., the production of space, rather than merely the interpretation or the imagination of space) that has influenced subsequent thinking in geography, urban sociology and related fields.    In your essay, examine the ways that the writings of other urban theorists (such as Manuel Castells or David Harvey or others) pick up on (or react to) Lefebvre's ideas.  Are you more surprised by the broad reach or limited impact of his ideas (on either theory or practice)?

3.  Spatial Fix/Space of Flows: David Harvey introduces the idea of the "spatial fix."  Manuel Castells introduces the contrasting concepts of "the space of places" and "the space of flows."  Begin by concisely summarizing each of these two arguments.  Then explore the possible connections and overlaps between the two arguments.  Perhaps the two are wholly unrelated, and this comparison is forced and misplaced. Is there a way to integrate Castells' and Harvey's concepts? If so, how? If not, why not?

4. Aspatial or Spatial Fetish or something else? One observes two seemingly contrary arguments in the writings of Harvey and Castells (among other texts): the authors assert the importance of space in society (and criticize those who neglect the role of space in shaping political and economic processes). But the authors also push back against what they see as assigning too much independent agency to space. (Is this why some authors are dismissive of "urban studies" as a stand-alone field?) In your essay, select one or several authors and examine this tension. Does it represent a contradiction, a paradox, and/or the appropriate efforts to define the complex role of space in social theory?

5. Abstraction, Modernism and Spatial Representation:

abstraction, n. 1. The act of withdrawing; withdrawal, separation or removal; in modern usage euphem. secret or dishonest removal; pilfering, purloining. ... 3. The act or process of separating in thought, of considering a thing independently of its associations; or a substance independently of its attributes; or an attribute or quality independently of the substance to which it belongs. 4. The result of abstracting: the idea of something which has no independent existence; a thing which exists only in idea; something visionary. 5. A state of withdrawal or seclusion from worldly things or things of sense. 6. The state of mental withdrawal; inattention to things present; absence of mind. 7. In the fine arts, the practice or state of freedom from representational qualities; a work of art with these characteristics. [OED]

Many of the course writings (e.g., Holston, J. Scott, Mitchell, Robinson, etc.) have addressed (either explicitly or implicitly) the process of abstraction in viewing, conceptualizing, mapping, representing, governing, regulating or designing urban (or regional or national) spaces. Referring to several course readings as examples, discuss the motivations, tools and consequences (either positive and/or negative) of abstraction in dealing with (urban) space. (Where appropriate, differentiate between such terms as "abstraction," "representation," "standardization," "modernism," etc.)

6. The Local and the Global: As with many dichotomies, the global-local framework provides an initially useful distinction but eventually may do as much to inhibit as to help us understand the relationship between globalization and local communities.  This dichotomy is related to a second dichotomy: the "global city" versus "non-global city" distinction, which could alternately be helpful or arbitrary and confusing. (And in this bifurcated world of city and world, what happens to the political-geographic scales that lie in-between, such as the region, the province and the nation-state?)
In your essay, compare how different class readings embrace, problematize, reframe or reject the local-global distinction. Which approaches do you find most or least helpful in analyzing contemporary urbanization, and why?

7. Nature and Urban Theory: Some might read this course’s syllabus and be puzzled by the week on nature, arguing that there is no need to discuss “nature” in an urban theory class. After all, nature is the non-urban, the “other,” the anti-urban. At most, nature is the “pre-urban”: land and biota waiting in reserve to be eventually transformed into the urban. The built and unbuilt environments are fundamentally divergent: nature follows one set of rules, and urban society another.
One theme of the October 28 readings is an argument for reconceptualizing the city-nature connection. Select several readings and compare the various ways to theorize the relationship between the built environment and the natural environment (e.g., conceptualizing nature and society as mutually exclusive; assuming that the urban can be understood without needing to bother with nature; instead arguing that urban theory is incomplete and biased if it ignores nature; the "city" and the "countryside" as essentially two labels on a single integrated system; as a parasitic or symbiotic relationship; nature as merely a social construction; cities as simply the latest iteration in the long evolutionary development process of life on Earth; etc.). What are implications (positive and negative) of these differing approaches?

Essay Three
due: Monday Dec 19 (end of day)

Answer one of the following questions. Where appropriate, cite course readings (and other relevant readings).  see these citation guidelines.

1. How well does Urban Theory inform and shape Urban Planning? After reading this rich range of texts over the semester, how does your encounter with urban theory shift your view of the fundamental agenda of urban planning? One might logically assume that our understanding of the purpose, values, economies, politics and spatial dynamics of cities in turn shapes how we seek to intervene in this complex urban system. Has this been your experience in this course? Or do you experience a wide chasm or disconnect between theory and practice? How does an enhanced and deepened understanding of urban theory shift your thinking (if at all) about the the task, the justification, the strengths and weaknesses (and potential risks) of urban planning? (As with other essays, to focus your analysis you might select several readings as key references.)

2. Is Urban Theory just about the City?
   At times in this course we have loosely interchanged several terms:  urban, place, space, city, metropolis.  Yet these terms are not synonymous, especially in an era where the city (at least in its contemporary sense) may no longer be either the predominant – or perhaps even most important – form of spatial development. Has urban theory privileged the “city” (its residents, their lifestyles and experiences) and built theory upon traditional notions of early modern central cities, thereby neglecting a wider range of human settlement patterns (such as suburbs, rural areas, peri-urban areas, border areas, and hybrid spaces not yet defined)?  What are the implications of discussing “urban theory” as opposed to a "theory of cities," a “theory of place” or a “theory of space?” 

3. Urban Theory and Social Theory
   Referring to a range of course readings, discuss several alternative answers to the question:  What is the relationship between urban theory (the theoretical core of disciplines such as urban planning, urban studies and geography) and social theory (theories used in the broader social sciences such as sociology, anthropology and political science)?   For example, is urban theory simply a subset of social theory? Is social theory a subset of urban theory? Is planning theory an adaptation/modification of social theory to incorporate space and the built environment (i.e., urban theory as spatialized social theory)?  Perhaps social theory is de-spatialized urban theory? Or does urban theory instead represent a fundamentally distinctive set of theories that operate apart from other social theories?  

4. Urban Theory in the Age of the Internet: We often speak of the socio-spatial dialectic (that society shapes cities, which turn around and shape society). We might also speak of a technological-spatial dialectic (that technology — including infrastructure, transportation modes and building technologies — shape our cities; and cities in turn shape technologies — since cities are the innovation, production and consumption centers of technologies). We might take this relationship a step further and speculate that an era’s technology shapes the way we visualize and theorize urbanization (e.g., a century ago, we turned to metaphors and models of mechanization, mass production, etc. to describe cities; now we turn to metaphors and models of computers, neural networks, etc.). For this essay, reflect on how our thinking about cities and urbanization is changing in this Internet era. Is there an emergent urban theory arising in response to all the talk of smart cities, urban informatics, cyborg urbanism, the “Internet of Things”, creating “a new operating system for cities,” ubiquitous computing, artificial intelligence and machine learning, etc.?

5. How do different disciplines view the city? The authors covered in the syllabus come from a range of disciplines (as do the students in our seminar). Select two disciplines (e.g., planning, architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, economics, comparative literature, geography, sociology, anthropology, information/media/data science, etc.) and compare how they engage the “urban” (e.g., definitions of the city or urbanization; the models or metaphors used to describe a city; the core assumptions; normative values; biases; a focus on networks, or stakeholders, or individuals, or landscapes, etc.). If useful, differentiate between space, place, land, property, territory, etc. Note: this is a potentially wide-ranging question, so you might strategically focus your analysis around several specific aspects of the urban (rather than attempting a comprehensive comparison across all conceivable elements).

    

Friday, Dec 9 • Final Session slide and short presentation

This last session will provide an opportunity to reflect on your encounters with urban theory (its texts, ideas and authors) and to identify the key themes and debates of urban theory. Format is flexible: you can combine text, keywords, questions, illustrations, diagrams, cartoons, maps, poems, songs, timelines, etc. Be ready to discuss and compare each student's contribution. Creativity and insightfulness  welcomed. You might provide a conceptual map of urban theory. I welcome a range of approaches:  typologies of theories; critiques; a focus on the dominant ideas; a focus on silences and biases in conventional planning theory; a focus on the past, present and/or future of planning theory; the challenges of linking theory and practice; etc.

• You are to prepare two items:

(a) Each student is to come to the session with a one-page handout (bring copies for everyone, please) that articulates your understanding/conceptualization of urban theory. Format is flexible: you can combine text, keywords, questions, illustrations, diagrams, timelines, etc. Be ready to discuss and compare each student's contribution. Creativity and insightfulness  welcomed. You might provide a conceptual map of urban theory. 

(b) a brief, 3-5 minute oral presentation that concisely highlights your central points.

For examples of past years, see the Canvas Module file