Three main tasks:

1. Read texts carefully and come to class ready to discuss and engage.
2. Sign up for 2-3 Presentations (and upload reading guides to the google site [link to be added] several days before the session's date).
3. Write three short essays.

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 only one volunteer). Each student should select 2 or 3 sessions. Write your name on the next to the weeks you select on the google site [link to be added]. [to edit, click on the pencil edit icon in the upper right] . Please review the syllabus and identify several weeks of interest, and talk to classmates about forming teams for a particular week. (If no-one volunteers for the Sept 12 session, I will take the lead on this one.)

(b) By TUESDAY of your week: Write and upload a critical "reading guide" to the google site [link to be added] (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 should have access to a digital projector.

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: Monday, Oct 10
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.  In your essay, select several representative essays from each 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, 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.)  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? 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. 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. Urbanization and Industrialization: Theorists commonly viewed urbanization and industrialization as two simultaneous, interwoven historical processes.  Is this interweave a valid understanding of cities or does it conflate two distinct processes? To what extent was a theory of industrialization simply a theory of urbanization (and vice versa)?  

5. Optimal City Size/Limits to City Size? Many of the authors in the first two weeks describe the dynamics and consequences of rapid urban growth, and the shift from rural to urban settlements. But do they talk about specific city sizes and differentiate between medium-sized cities, large-cities and megacities (or do they just treat all cities the same)? Do they see urbanization as an unending process (e.g., infinitely scalable) or one with limits and boundaries (either in population size, density or the physical expanse of the city)? Select several readings and compare each author's view on the relationship between city size (however measured) and its consequences or limits.

Essay Two (Harvey, Castells, Lefebvre, and the geographers)
due: Sunday, Nov 20 (revised)

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

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 agendas has waned since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, how has the credibility and veracity of a Marxist-based urban theory changed?  (Optional: what are the prospects of a systematic, rigorous, non-Marxist theoretical critique of capitalist urbanism?)

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) pick up on (or react to) Lefebvre's ideas. 

3. The Evolution of a Theorist: In reading the anthologies of both David Harvey (b. 1935) and Manuel Castells (b. 1942), one can follow the intellectual evolution of two urban theorists over several decades.  In your essay, examine the evolution in thinking in the writings of either Harvey and/or 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.  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 connections between the two arguments.  Is there a way to integrate Castells' and Harvey's concepts? If so, how?

5. 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. 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?

6.The Geographic Imagination: Urban theory is not exclusively or even primarily a home-grown product within the urban planning discipline. Planners, in search of theories for their field, widely read texts from sociology, architecture, political science, history, environmental studies, anthropology, law, economics, etc. Some planning theorists frequently turn to writings from geography (as seen in the reading list for this course). In these multidisciplinary conversations about urban theory, do you hear a distinctive voice coming from geographers? Do geographers conceptualize central terms of urban theory (e.g., space, place, territory, the city, the region, clustering, density, borders, distance, adjacency, urbanism, topography, time vs. space, dimensions of space, etc.) differently from other disciplines? Do geographers ask a distinctive set of questions (that are different from questions in planning, architecture, etc.)? To help focus your essay, you (optionally) might compare geography to one other discipline (such as urban planning, architecture, history or economics).

Essay Three
due: Monday, Dec 19

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

1. Nature and Urban Theory
One theme of the November 18 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?

2. 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.  (And this dichotomy is related to a second: the "global city" versus "non-global city" distinction.) In your essay, compare how different class readings reiterate, problematize, reframe or reject the local-global and/or global/non-global couplings. Which approaches do you find most or least helpful in analyzing contemporary urbanization, and why?

3. Abstraction 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]

Several of the course writings (e.g., Holston, Scott, Mitchell, Robinson, etc.) have addressed (either explicitly or implicitly) the process of abstraction in viewing, conceptualizing, representing or designing urban (or regional or national) spaces. Referring to several course readings as examples, discuss the motivations, tools and consequences of abstraction in urbanism. What is gained and what is lost? (Where appropriate, differentiate between such terms as "abstraction," "representation," "standardization," "modernism," etc.)

4. Culture and Urban Theory
Scenario: you are leading a class on urbanization and cities. During a discussion about the differences between various North American cities, you display an array of city-level statistics and thematic maps: population, income, poverty rates, land use coverage, education levels, infrastructure spending, employment by industry and occupation, fiscal health, etc. A student, who has been sitting restlessly throughout the hour, finally blurts out: "All this data is well and good, but you can't really understand the essence of these cities, and why these cities are different, unless you look at culture. All this data doesn't explain why Seattle or San Francisco is more creative and innovative than Cleveland or Detroit, or why the immigrant experience is different in Los Angeles than Miami. The study of culture should be at the center of urban studies; otherwise, you'll never really understand cities."
In your essay, develop a response to this student's frustration-driven complaint. Referring to relevant class readings (and beyond), examine the various strategies to engage "culture" in urban theory. What do you find are productive versus obscurant, wheel-spinning ways to speak of culture in urban theory?

5. 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?  

6. Is Urban Theory just about the City?
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, 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 place” or a “theory of space?”