Schedule

 

FRAMEWORKS FOR THINKING ABOUT THE URBAN: A FIRST PASS Thursday, January 28 What is a city? Lecturer: Leonard Nevarez. Questions for today: 1. How does a city differ from a metropolis and an urban area? 2. How does urbanization differ from urbanism?   Tuesday, February 2 The urban crisis in America. Lecturer: Leonard Nevarez. Questions for today: 1. What are the general features of the post-WWII "urban crisis"? 1. How has the historical context in which urban studies emerged shaped its agenda? 2. How do 'problems in the city' differ from 'problems of the city'?   Assigned readings: Suarez, Ray. 1999. "What We Lost." Pp. 1-25 in The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration, 1966-1999. New York: Free Press. Fishman, Robert. 2000. "The American Metropolis at Century's End: Past and Future Influences." Housing Policy Debate 11(1): 199-213. Beauregard, Robert. 2010. "Urban Studies." Pp. 931-6 in Encyclopedia of Urban Studies, edited by R. Hutchison. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.   Urban Studies campus lecture: Tuesday, February 2, 5:30 pm in Taylor Hall 203 Robert J. Phocas (‘91), Energy and Sustainability Manager, Charlotte, NC: "Where Do We Go From Here: Building Smart Cities."   Thursday, February 4 Urban restructuring across the world. Lecturer: Leonard Nevarez. Questions for today: 1. How have economic shifts redistributed wealth across the world's population? 2. How do London, Berlin, Punta del Este, Mumbai, and San Bernardino illustrate the new urban hierarchy? 3. What economic conditions and material infrastructure drive planetary urbanization?   Assigned readings: Lin, Patrick. 2016. "Six Trends to Understanding a Rapidly Urbanizing World." 100 Resilient Cities [blog], January 11. Cowell, Alan. 2015. "The Rich are Fighting the Superrich Over Britain's Manicured Heart." New York Times, December 22. Connolly, Kate. 2010. "Berlin: Poor But Sexy, and Oozing Creative Wealth." The Guardian, January 22. Balch, Oliver. 2016. "Punta del Este: Is Uruguay's Uber-Rich 'Gated City' a Glimpse of Our Urban Future?" The Guardian, October 16. Boo, Katherine. 2012. "Annawadi." Pp. 3-16 in Behind the Beautiful Forevers. New York: Random House. Mozingo, Joe. 2015. "San Bernardino: Broken City." Los Angeles Times, June 14. Brenner, Neil. 2013. "Theses on Urbanization." Public Culture 25(1): 85-114.   Tuesday, February 9 The ancient city. Lecturer: Leonard Nevarez. Questions for today: 1. How have cities historically organized the conditions for human civilization? 2. How does the accumulation of surplus drive urbanization and urbanism? 3. How do the world's ancient cities compare and contrast with the contemporary cities we read about for the last class?   Assigned readings: Mumford, Lewis. 1986 [1938]. "What is a City?" Pp. 104-107 in The Lewis Mumford Reader, edited by Donald L. Miller. New York: Pantheon. Douglas, Ian. 2013. "Trading Village to Global Megalopolis: The Origins and Expansion of Cities." Pp. 7-22 in Cities: An Environmental History. London: I.B. Tauris.   Thursday, February 11 The right to the city. Lecturer: Leonard Nevarez Question for today: 1. What major demographic, social, and environmental changes marked the rise of modern industrial cities in the early nineteenth century? 2. How does urbanization promote the formation of distinct class identities?  3. How does 'the right to the city' provide a framework for evaluating and intervening in urban life and urban environments?   Assigned readings: Engels, Friedrich. 1987 [1845]. "The Great Towns." Pp. 68-110 in The Condition of the Working Class in England. New York: Penguin Books.  Harvey, David. 2008. "The Right to the City."New Left Review 53(Sep-Oct): 23-40.   Tuesday, February 16 First short paper due.   POLITICAL ECONOMY: HOUSING AND URBAN INEQUALITY Thursday, February 18 Inequality in the U.S. and its cities. Lecturer: Tim Koechlin. Questions for today: 1. How is income and wealth inequality linked to other forms of inequality (access to housing, health care, education; political inequality, etc.)? 2. While inequality has been rising in the US since 1980 or so, middle class Americans remain, by global and historical standards, very well off. And further impoverished people in the US have — by historical and global standards — a lot of stuff. And further still, while the "1%" have gotten very rich since 1980, the incomes middle class and the poor have fallen relatively little. So... why should inequality in the US concern us? Is this merely about resenting the soaring success of the very rich? Why should inequality concern, esp., urbanists? 3. In what ways is inequality an urban problem? What do we mean by "urban inequality"?   Assigned readings: Koechlin, Tim. 2014. "Winner Take All: Soaring Inequality in the U.S. and Why It Matters." Huffington Post [blog], January 24. Koechlin, Tim. 2015. "Urban Inequality, Neoliberalism, and the Case for a Multidisciplinary Economics." Review of Radical Political Economy 46(4): 1-10. Wilkinson, Richard. 2011. "How Economic Inequality Harms Societies." TEDGlobal Talk, July. Krugman, Paul. 2015. "Despair, American Style." New York Times, November 9. New York Times Editorial Board. 2015. "How Segregation Destroys Black Wealth." New York Times, September 15. Leonhardt, David. 2013. "In Climbing Income Ladder, Location Matters." New York Times, July 22.   Tuesday, February 23 Urban exchange and use values. Lecturer: Leonard Nevarez. Questions for today: 1. Within any one city or neighborhood, how does the conflict between exchange values and use values of place organize people's interests and roles? 2. How do growth machines' pursuit of growth organize a stratification of places across cities and neighborhoods? 3. What is a "place," according to Logan & Molotch's political economic perspective?   Assigned readings: Nevarez, Leonard. Forthcoming. "Urban Political Economy." In The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, 2nd ed., edited by G. Ritzer. Oxford: Blackwell. Logan, John R. and Harvey L. Molotch. 2007. "Places as Commodities." Chap. 2 in Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place, 20th anniv. ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.   Thursday, February 25 Interdependent inequalities: suburbs and cities Lecturer: Tim Koechlin. Questions for today: 1. What are the connections between and among segregation, inequality, and social (im)mobility? 2. How, during the post WWII period, has government policy encouraged suburbanization? (See Place Matters, pp 103-123) What effect did these policies have on US cities? 3. Why (and for whom) is sprawl a problem?   Assigned readings: Dreier, Peter, John Mollenkopf and Todd Swanstrom. 2004. Chap. 1, pp. 103-123 in Place Matters. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press. Casey, Colleen, Peter Dreier, Robert Flack and Todd Swanstrom. 2004. "Pulling Apart: Economic Segregation among Suburbs and Central Cities in Major Metropolitan Areas." Brookings Institution, Research Report, October.     Tuesday, March 1 Renters and rentiers. Lecturer: Leonard Nevarez. Questions for today: 1. How do landlords differ: small-scale vs. corporate, local vs. absentee, etc.? Do those differences matter for renters? 2. How did the recent recession affect supply and demand for rental housing in the U.S.? 3. Is increasing homeownership an appropriate goal for housing policy?   Assigned readings: Desmond, Matthew. 2016. Pp. 9-31, 64-79, 94-107 in Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. New York: Crown. Samara, Tony Rashan. 2014. Rise of the Renter Nation. New York: Right to the City Alliance.   Thursday, March 3 Race, housing and inequality. Lecturer: Tim Koechlin. Guest: Jonathan Bix, Nobody Leaves Mid-Hudson. Questions for today: 1. Dreier et al., in Place Matters, argue that the policies that promoted suburbanization were racist — often quite explicitly so — and that the consequences of these policies — sprawl, American style — have promoted segregation and inequality across space, and economic immobility. Explain. 2. How/why is segregation in housing — within cities, and between cities and suburbs — the result of government policies (at the local and federal levels)?   Assigned readings: Rothstein, Richard. 2015. " From Ferguson to Baltimore: The Fruits of Government-Sponsored Segregation." Economic Policy Institute, Working Economics [blog], April 29. Rothstein, Richard. 2015. "The Making of Ferguson: Public Policies at the Root of its Troubles." Economic Policy Institute, October 15. [Read first section: "Executive Summary"] Kiel, Paul. 2015. "Debt and the Racial Wealth Gap." New York Times, December 31, 2015.   Tuesday, March 8 Lecturer: Leonard Nevarez. In-class film: Urbanized (2011, dir. Gary Huswitt).   Thursday, March 10 Second short paper due.   SPRING BREAK: MARCH 12-27   POLITICS OF URBAN-RURAL: MIGRATION, LAND AND SUSTAINABILITY Tuesday, March 29 Managing rural-urban migration: Hukou system. Lecturer: Fubing Su Questions for today: 1. What is a Hukou system? 2. How does the Hukou system affect migrants' lives in Chinese cities? 3. Are there positive aspects of the Hukou system?   Assigned readings: Johnson, Ian. 2013. "China's Great Uprooting: Moving 250 Million Into Cities." New York Times, June 15. Chan, Kam Wing and Will Buckingham. 2008. "Is China Abolishing the Hukou System?" China Quarterly 195: 582-606. Wong, Keung, Daniel Fu, Chang Ying Li and He Xue Song. 2007. "Rural Migrant Workers in Urban China: Living a Marginalised Life." International Journal of Social Welfare 16: 32-40.   Thursday, March 31 Leaping forward: urbanization, Chinese style. Lecturer: Fubing Su. Questions for today: 1. Why are local governments so eager to promote urbanization? 2. How has it undermined social stability in the cities and the rural communities? 3. Is this confrontation inevitable? What can be done to mitigate this conflicts?   Assigned readings and viewings: Su, Fubing and Ran Tao. 2015. "The China Model Withering? Institutional Roots of China’s Local Developmentalism" Urban Studies, first published online in July 7: 1-21. "Taishi Village Revolt" (please watch 46:17-52:00). "Wukan: After the Uprising" (Al Jazeera, 2013).   Urban Studies campus lecture: Monday, April 4, 6:00 pm in Rockefeller 200 Miriam Greenberg, UC Santa Cruz: "Beyond Ecotopia: Green Displacement and the Challenge of Equity in the Sustainable City."   Tuesday, April 5 Making cities sustainable: Environment as a divider and uniter. Lecturer: Fubing Su Questions for today: 1. How do environmental issues divide city lives? 2. How do environmental issues affect cities' relationship with rural communities? 3. Can smog be a unifier?   Assigned readings and viewings: Shapiro, Judith. 2012. Pp. 135-165 in China’s Environmental Challenges. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Patel, Sona. 2015. "In the Dirtiest Cities, Air Pollution Forces Life Changes." New York Times, December 22. "Under the Dome: Investigating China's Smog" (2015). "Smog Journeys" (Greenpeace East Asia, 2015).   Thursday, April 7 Lecturer: Leonard Nevarez.   GENRE, FOREIGN BODIES, AND THE ETHICS OF CO-HABITATION Tuesday, April 12 Third short paper due. Revisiting/resisting colonial settlement and racial-spatial orders. Lecturer: Samson Opondo. Questions for today: 1. In what ways does The Battle of Algiers as an example of third cinema mobilize a critical form of thinking about bodies, racial-spatial orders, and the city-body relationship? 2. How does attentiveness to the multiplicity of urban rhythms and experiences enable us to discern and articulate the politics of race, space and colonialism in the city?   Assigned readings and viewings: The Battle of Algiers (1966, dir. Gillo Pontecorvo). Highmore, Ben. 2005. "Colonial Spacing - Control and Conflict in the Colonial and Neo-Colonial City." Pp. 70-91 in Cityscapes :Cultural Readings of the Material and Symbolic City. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1992. "Bodies – Cities." Pp. 241-253 in Sexuality and Space, edited by Beatrice Colomina. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press. Recommended reading: Fanon, Frantz. 1963. "On Violence." From The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press.   Thursday, April 14 Gendered bodies, trauma, and postcolonial city space. Lecturer: Samson Opondo. Question for today: 1. In what ways does the postcolonial novel enable us to map gender, disjunctive times, trauma, and the city-body relationship?   Assigned readings: Djebar, Assia. 1992. Pp. 5-52, 133-142 in Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, translated by Marjolijn de Jager; afterword by Clarisse Zimra. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1992. Mehta, Brinda. "The Politics of the Female Body: Asia Djebar's Women of Algiers in Their Apartment and Fatima Mernissi's Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood." Pp. 121-151 in Rituals of Memory in Contemporary Arab Women's Writing. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Recommended reading: Fanon, Frantz. 1967. "Algeria Unveiled." From A Dying Colonialism. New York: Grove Press.   Tuesday, April 19 Global circuits of abjection: cinema, migrancy, and the right to life/the city. Lecturer: Samson Opondo. Questions for today: 1. How do global cities provide the grid and order of precarity that connects or abjects various forms of 'foreign bodies'? 2. How does attentiveness to the cinema-city-body relationship (in Dirty Pretty Things and Constant Gardener) reveal the relationship between global flows of capital and bodies and biocolonial formations? 3. What forms of cohabitation become possible or imaginable in the city?   Assigned viewings and reading: Dirty Pretty Things (2004, dir. Stephen Frears). The Constant Gardener (2006, dir. Fernando Meirelles). Stein, Rachel. 2010. "Disposable Bodies: Biocolonialism in The Constant Gardener and Dirty Pretty Things. Pp. 101-115 in Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film, edited by Paula Willoquet-Maricondi. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press.   Thursday, April 21 Lecturer: Leonard Nevarez.   VISUAL URBANISM: THE OPTICS OF URBAN MODERNITY Tuesday, April 26 The emergent metropolis & the industrialization of perception: railroad, urban crowd, movie palace Lecturer: Lisa Brawley. Questions for today: 1. What is the "industrialization of perception"? 2. How are transformations in modes of viewing linked to transformations in the built environment? 3. What are the links between the emergent metropolis and the emergence of cinema, and why might this be important and interesting to students of urban studies? 4. What would it mean to approach media as a vector of urbanization instead of simply a representation of it?   Assigned readings and viewing: Simmel, Georg. 2003 [1903]. "The Metropolis and Mental Life." Pp. 12-19 in The City Cultures Reader, 2d ed., edited by M. Miles, T. Hall and I. Borden. New York: Routledge. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. 1986. "Railroad Time & Railroad Space" and "Panoramic Perception." In The Railway Journey: The Industrialization and Perception of Time and Space. Berkeley: University of California Press. View/explore: "Berlin: Symphony of a Great [as in very large] City" (1927, dir. Walter Ruttmann).  Note: this is a silent film in "five acts." View the first 5 minutes or so, and a 5-10 minute segment midway through (starting around 40 minutes in). We'll view a few excerpts of it together in class as well.  For further reading: Bruno, Giuilliana. 2007.  “Motion and Emotion: Film and the Urban Fabric.” Pp. 14-27 in Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis, edited by A. Webber and E. Wilson. London: Wallflower Press.   Thursday, April 28 Thinking through "The Perceptual Form of the City" Lecturer: Lisa Brawley. Questions for today: 1. What is the "perceptual form of the city”? 2. What makes a city “legible” (and to whom)? Why (and for whom) is a legibility important? 3. How might different scopic regimes empower particular urban actors and urban actions?   Assigned readings: Stierli, Martino. 2009. "In Sequence: Cinematic Perception in Learning from Las Vegas." Hunch 12: 76-85. DeCerteau, Michel. 1984. Brief excerpt from "Walking in the City." Pp. 91-93 in The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lynch, Kevin. 1996 [1960]. Brief excerpt from The Image of the City." Pp. 98-102 in The City Reader, edited by Richard T. LeGates and Frederick Stout. New York: Routledge.   Tuesday, May 3 Information space: the urban in an age of ubiquitous computing and planetary urbanization. Lecturer: Lisa Brawley. Questions for today: 1. How does the “mixed reality city” differ from the city we’ve come to know through cinema or the sequenced snapshot? 2. How are “smart” media — ubiquitous computing, intelligent maps, satellite imagery, the internet of things — transforming our knowledge of and experience in the metropolis? 3. What forms of representation does "planetary urbanization” enable or require?   Assigned readings: Shepard, Mark. 2011. "Toward the Sentient City." Pp. 16-37 in Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Diller, Elizabeth and Ricardo Scofidio. 2005. "Architecture as Habitable Medium." Pp. 184-95 in Disappearing Architecture: From Real to Virtual to Quantum, edited by G. Flachbart and P. Weibel. Basel: Birkhäuser. Brenner, Neil and Christian Schmid. 2014. "Planetary Urbanization." Pp. 160-163 in Implosions/Explosions: Toward a Study of Planetary Urbanization, edited by N. Brenner. Berlin: Jovis. Recommended: Kurgan, Laura. 2013. Excerpt from Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics. New York: Zone.   Thursday, May 5 Lecturer: Leonard Nevarez.   Tuesday, May 10 Last day of class. Lecturer: Leonard Nevarez.   Tuesday, May 17 Last day of study period: take-home exam due.