Short Presentation & Critical "Reading Guide"
For each week (starting Sept. 19), two students will do the following:
(a) Write a critical "reading guide" to the week's readings. Email your text to the class listserv by Friday before the selected week. (Suggested length: 8 - 12 paragraphs.). The students in each group should write a single, combined text and send it out as a single email. 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.

(b) Start the class with a brief presentation (10-15 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." If you plan to use a digital projector, please reserve well ahead of time at the Media Center.

We will begin selecting two students for each class during the first week. Please review the syllabus and identify several weeks of interest, and talk to classmates about forming teams of two for a particular week. Note: the number of presentations done per student will depend on class size, but will likely be 1-2 presentations per student over the course of the semester.

Short Essays [revised schedule]
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:  Tuesday, October 10, 2006
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. We began by reading the German and Chicago Schools, followed by a week with the economists.  In your essay, contrast the sociological and economic view of cities and urbanization.  Consider several aspects, such as the main questions posed, their underlying assumptions (and biases), and their emphasis on city-as-experience versus city-as-process.   (Note:   if you find it too problematic to generalize across an entire discipline, you may write about a subset of the sociology and/or economic approaches.) 

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.  (Lewis Mumford seems to alternately express both hope and doom.)  In your essay, explore the strands of pro- and anti-urbanism in the texts.  What are their reasons for their divergent views of city life?  (For example, is it the shift from Gemeinschaft to  Gesellschaft?)  

3. A central question of urban theory is simply:  why are there cities?  How well (or poorly) do the readings address this question?  (Select several readings as examples.)  Is a satisfactory answer to this question (why are there cities?) a prerequisite for further inquiries into urbanization, or can one do fundamental research on cities without bothering with this existential “first question”?

4. Theorists commonly viewed urbanization and industrialization as two simultaneous, interwoven historical processes.  If this approach was valid, then to what extent was a theory of industrialization simply a theory of urbanization (and vice versa)?  Does this interweave of the two processes still apply today (in the context of contemporary cities and economies)? 

Essay Two (Harvey, Castells, Lefebvre)
due:  Wednesday, Nov. 22, 2006 [date revised]

Answer one of the following questions.  Where appropriate, cite course readings. 

1. Several authors of course readings have employed Marxist analysis.  What do you make of this Marxist thread to many of these urban theory writings?  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 agendas has waned in recent years, how has the credibility and veracity of a Marxist-based urban theory changed? 

2. Henri Lefebvre (1901 – 1991) introduces a distinctive approach to the concept of space that has influenced subsequent thinking in geography, urban sociology and related fields.    In your essay, examine the ways that the writings of Manuel Castells and/or David Harvey pick up on (or react to) Lefebvre’s ideas. 

3.  In reading the anthologies of both David Harvey (b. 1935) and Manuel Castells (b. 1942), we have followed intellectual evolution of two urban theorists over several decades.  In your essay, contrast the evolution in thinking of Harvey and Castells.  Identify the fundamental continuities and transformations.  Where you note changes, do you interpret them as responses to the changing urban-economic world, as responses to changes in the scholarly world of theory, or as a more internal (biographical) evolution in thinking?

4.  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 connections between the two arguments.  Is there a way to combine Castells’ and Harvey’s concepts?

Essay Three (global cities, LA School, suburbanization, urban social movements)
due:  Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2006 [date revised]

Answer one of the following questions.  Where appropriate, cite course readings. If the earlier two essays were 4 - 5 pages, aim for 5 -7 pages for Essay Three.

1. At times in this course we have loosely interchanged several terms:  urban, place, space, city.  Yet these terms are not synonymous, especially in an era where the city (at least in its modern sense) is no longer either the dominant – 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, nomads)?  What are the implications of discussing “urban theory” as opposed to a “theory of place” or a “theory of space?” 

2. One speaks of the LA School, the Chicago School, etc., of urban theory.  The labels themselves are ambiguous:  does the city label refer to the location of the scholars; the initial object of study; and/or the ultimate geographic range of application of these theories?  In your essay, examine to what extent urban theories are developed to explain phenomena in specific cities.   Consider several hypotheses:  (a) scholars develop general urban theories that arise from the observation of a wide variety of urban settings;  (b) scholars develop specific urban theories, based on the observation of one or more similar cities, that only are intended to narrowly apply to the class of cities observed;  (c) scholars observe one or more similar cities, but then make more general claims (either appropriately or not) that these theories apply to cities universally.   How do various authors from the course readings approach the specificity or universality of their theories?   You can consider the relevance to other American cities and/or cities around the world.

3. Several interrelated themes have emerged in course readings and discussions:  diversity, tolerance, otherness, and heterogeneity in cities.  One might see this in the early writings of the German and Chicago Schools through to the contemporary readings (from Dec. 5).  In your essay, discuss how one or more of these themes has evolved and changed over the intellectual history of urban theory. 

4. 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.  In your essay, compare how different class readings reiterate, problematize, reframe or reject the local-global coupling.  Which approaches do you find most or least helpful in analyzing contemporary urbanization, and why?