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with questions to guide
readings
Scott Greer, "Urbanism and Urbanity: Cities in an Urban Dominated Society."
Questions to guide reading
1. What is the difference between urbanism and urbanity?
2. How do people influence cities from Greer's perspective?
Max Weber, "The Nature of the City" [on reserve only].Georg Simmel, "The Metropolis and Mental Life."
Questions to guide reading
1. How do Weber and Simmel's explanations of city life differ in kind?
2. How is the city synonymous with modernity and modern mentalities for the German School authors?
Ernest Burgess, "The Growth of the City: Introduction to a Research Project."Earl S. Johnson, "The Function of the Central Business District in the Metropolitan Community" [on reserve only].
Amos H. Hawley, "Spatial Aspects of Ecological Organization."
Questions to guide reading
1. How do the biological connotations of urban ecology inform these authors' understanding of how urbanization and population growth are determined?
2. What is the role for individuals in these urban processes?
CANCELLED: Special mandatory session in library's electronic classroom for instruction on Poughkeepsie research (assignment 1).
R. E. Park, "the Mind of the Hobo: Reflections upon the Relation between Mentality and Locomotion."Louis Wirth, "Urbanism as a Way of Life."
Questions to guide reading
1. What are the spatial patterns behind organized and disorganized urban behavior?
2. How do Park and Wirth reflect the ideas of the German school? How do they depart from them?
Zorbaugh, chaps. 1-8 in The Gold Coast and the Slum.
Questions to guide reading
1. What does community mean for Zorbaugh? How is it an ecological phenomenon?
2. What is the relation between neighborhood and deviance?
Zorbaugh, chaps. 9-11 in The Gold Coast and the Slum.Albert Hunter, "Community Mislaid: Shifts in Rhetoric and Research on Community from the Chicago School to Today's Communalism" [on reserve only].
Questions to guide reading
1. Can community be restored, according to Zorbaugh?
2. How is communion different than community for Hunter? What does that portend for the "return to community" movement?
Assignment 1 due.L. S. Bourne, "Urban Systems: Concepts and Empirical Background."
Richard Hay, Jr., "Patterns of Urbanization and Socio-Economic Development in the Third World: An Overview" [on reserve only].
Questions to guide reading
1. How are these urban systems theories an extension of urban ecology? A departure?
2. How might these theories influence policies on urban and national development?
Ali A. Mazrui, "Mombasa: Three Stages towards Globalization" [on reserve only].
Recommended reading
Manuel Castells, "The International Mode of Development and the Restructuring of Capitalism." In Readings in Urban Theory, edited by S. Campbell and S. Fainstein. Blackwell, 1996.
Questions to guide reading
1. What does Mazrui introduce to the theories we have discussed to date?
2. Assuming that the historical era in which earlier urban systems theories were developed has passed, is there anything still relevant to the concept of urban hierarchy?
Jacobs, chaps. 1-11 in The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
Recommended reading
Mike Davis, selected chapter from Magical Urbanism.
Questions to guide reading
1. What kinds of built environment makes a great city, according to Jacobs?
2. What role does Jacobs give to non-spatial forms of social organization (e.g., residential classes, voluntary associations) in sustaining the great city?
POSTPONED UNTIL OCTOBER 12: Special mandatory session in library's electronic classroom for instruction on US Census research (assignment 2).
Maurice Broady, "Social Theory in Architectural Design."
Questions to guide reading
1. How do architects (as exemplified by Broady) and Jane Jacobs differently theorize the relation of urban behavior to the built environment?
Herbert Gans, "City Planning and Urban Realities" [hand-out].Herbert Gans, selections from The Urban Villagers [on reserve only].
Recommended readings
The Present/Future of Little Italies (photoessay by Jerome Krase, Brooklyn College, CUNY).
Questions to guide reading
1. On what basis does Gans reject Jacobs' claim that a great built environment sustains urban vitality?
2. How does the built environment influence the social organization of the West Enders, according to Gans?
3. What general theoretical claims can be drawn from Gans' culturally specific account of the West End?
Recommended exercise
"People with similar lifestyles tend to live near one another," claims the You Are Where You Live! website (maintained by the Claritas marketing group). Enter the zip code from your current (non-Vassar) neighborhoods to see what demographic clusters also live nearby. How do your findings reflect Gans' theories on social factors of community?
Special mandatory session in library's electronic classroom for instruction on US Census research (assignment 2).
Recommended reading
Claude Fischer, "Toward a Subcultural Theory of Urbanism."
Questions to guide reading
1. How have the readings to date exemplified a determinist, compositionalist, or subcultural theory of urbanism?
Gardner, Passing By.
Questions to guide reading
1. What assumptions about gender, civility, and safety made by previous theorists does Gardner illuminate?
2. How does gender compel urban theorists to rethink what counts as "urban" and "public"?
Elijah Anderson, "The Black Male in Public."
Questions to guide reading
1. What is the relation of race, class, and gender conflicts in the city to their larger, non-spatial forms?
2. Does the city still constitute a public sphere as Jacobs envisaged? Did it ever?
Assignment 2 due.John Logan and Harvey Molotch, "Places as Commodities."
Recommended readingJohn Logan and Harvey Molotch, "The City as a Growth Machine." In Readings in Urban Theory, edited by S. Campbell and S. Fainstein. Blackwell, 1996.
Question to guide reading1. Compared to the urban ecologists, how do urban political economists understand urban structure and urban growth?
Receive take-home midterm questions.David Harvey, "The Urban Process under Capitalism: A Framework for Analysis."
Question to guide reading
1. What roles do cities play in the capitalist accumulation of wealth?
NO CLASS: Take-home midterm due.
3:00-4:30: Special mandatory session in library's electronic classroom: instruction on online data-gathering and evaluation (assignment 3).
In-class exercise: interurban competition for capital investment.Todd Swanstrom, "The Politics of Default."
Recommended reading
M. Gottdiener and Joe Feagin, "The Paradigm Shift in Urban Sociology."
Gregory Squires, "Partnership and the Pursuit of the Private City." In Readings in Urban Theory, edited by S. Campbell and S. Fainstein. Blackwell, 1996.
Questions to guide reading
1. How do (at least certain) people make a difference against the structural forces of capitalism?
2. Is interurban competition for capital investment functional or dysfunctional for cities? For capital? For capitalism?
Mike Davis, "Fortress L.A."Sharon Zukin, "Space and Symbols in an Age of Decline" [on reserve only].
Recommended reading
Reviving Main Street, or Living in the Past? (by Joel Kotkin, New York Times, October 15, 2000).
Questions to guide reading1. How is urban conflict symbolically mediated?
2. How does the production, circulation, and consumption of symbols affect urban structure?
Davis and Zukin (cont.).
Students should have obtained web-authoring skills (on their own or through a Vassar instructional workshop) by this date.St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, "Bronzeville."
In-class film: "Public Housing."
Recommended reading
Robert E. Park, "The Ghetto" [hand-out].
Questions to guide reading
1. How does Bronzeville differ from the traditional ethnic enclave?
2. How do Drake and Cayton reflect and/or critique their Chicago School training?
Wilson, chaps. 1-5 in When Work Disappears.In-class film: "Public Housing."
Questions to guide reading1. What has happened to the ghetto since Drake and Cayton wrote about it?
2. Is Wilson's underclass different from the Chicago School idea of social disorganization?
Assignment 3 due.Loic J. D. Wacquant, "Three Pernicious Premises in the Study of the American Ghetto."
Recommended reading
Robin D.G. Kelley, "Lookin' for the Real N***a" [on reserve only].
Questions to guide reading
1. On what basis does Wacquant critique Wilson's understanding of the ghetto?
2. Do academic theories of the underclass worsen the problems of African-American poor?
December 5
Manuel Castells, "The Space of Flows."
Recommended reading
Saskia Sassen, "The Global City." In Readings in Urban Theory, edited by S. Campbell and S. Fainstein. Blackwell, 1996.
Questions to guide reading
1. How do cities provide the industrial organization that was formerly contained within corporations?
2. How does the symbolic economy alter urban systems as understood either by mainstream urbanists (e.g., Bourne, the Chicago School) or critical urbanists (e.g., Hay, Mazrui)?
Receive take-home final exam questions.Lin, Reconstructing Chinatown.
Questions to guide reading
1. How does Chinatown differ from the traditional ethnic enclave?
2. How does Lin incorporate, update, and/or critique (a) the sociocultural school of urban sociology, (b) urban political economy, and (c) the symbolic economy?