Course Syllabus

SCHEDULE

[Bold is required reading]

Part 1: Survey

1) Sept 2: Introduction: Modern Utopias? Forms and Performances

2) Sept 9: Cities and "city-ness"

Georg Simmel, "The Metropolis and Mental Life," 1905.

R. K. Home, "Town Planning & Garden Cities in the British Colonial Empire, 1910-1940," Planning Perspectives 5 (1990) 23-37.

Neil Brenner with Christian Schmid, "Planetary Urbanization," in Critique of Urbanization (Birkhäuser, 2017) 186-190.

Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-Morrow (London, 1902) SKIM.

Patrick Geddes, "The Valley Section," in David Lewis, ed., Urban Structure (1968) 65-71.

Konstanze Sylva Domhardt, “The Garden City Idea in the CIAM Discourse on Urbanism: A Path to Comprehensive Planning, Planning Perspectives 27 (2012) 173–197.

3) Sept 16: Units, Towns and Villages

Andrew Homer, "Creating New Communities: The Role of the Neighborhood Unit in Post-War British Planning," Contemporary British History 14:1 (2000) 63-80.

Juliana Maxim, "Mass Housing and Collective Experience: On the Notion of Microraion in Romania in the 1950s and 1960s," The Journal of Architecture 14: 1 (2009) 7-26.

Clarence A. Perry, “The Neighborhood Unit, a Scheme of Arrangement for the Family-Life Community,” in Neighborhood & Community Planning (NY: Committee on Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs, 1929) SKIM.

Lidwine Spoormans, Daniel Navas-Carrillo, Hielkje Zijlstra, Teresa Pérez-Cano, “Planning History of a Dutch New Town: Analyzing Lelystad through Its Residential Neighborhoods,” Urban Planning 4: 3 (2019) 102–116.

4) Sept 23: Smart Cites (eco, sustainable, digital, resilient)

Robert G. Hollands, "Beyond the Corporate Smart City" Glimpses of Other Possibilities of Smartness," in Marvin, Luque-Ayala, McFarlane, eds., Smart Urbanism: Utopian Vision or False Dawn? (Routledge, 2016) 168-184.

Nick Dunn and Paul Cureton, “Frictionless Futures: The Vision of Smartness and the Occlusion of Alternatives,” in Sergio M. Figueiredo, Sukanya Krishnamurthy, Torsten Schroedery, eds., Architecture and the Smart City (Routledge, 2019) 17-27.

Andres Luque-Ayala and Simon Marvin, "Developing a Critical Understanding of Smart Urbanism?" Urban Studies 52: 12 (2015) 2105–2116.

Rob Kitchin, Tracey P. Lauricault and Gavin McArdle, "Smart Cities and the Politics of Urban Data," in Simon Marvin, Andres Luque-Ayala and Colin McFarlane, eds., Smart Urbanism: Utopian Vision or False Dawn? (2016) 16-31.

Keller Easterling, "Zone: The Spatial Softwares of Extrastatecraft," Places Journal [online] (June 2012).

5): Sept 30: Platforms and Platformization

Federico Caprotti, I.‑Chun Catherine Chang and Simon Joss, “Beyond the Smart City: A Typology of Platform Urbanism,” Urban Transformations 4: 4 (2022) 1-18.

Shannon Mattern, “Methodolatry and the Art of Measure,” Places Journal [online] (November 2013). 

Jathan Sadowski, "Who Owns the Future City? Phases of Technological Urbanism and Shifts in Sovereignty," Urban Studies 58:8 (2021) 1732–1744.

Orit Halpern, Robert Mitchell and Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, "The Smartness Mandate: Notes Toward a Critique," Grey Room 68 (Summer 2017) 107-125.

Part 2: Themes

6) Oct 7. Knowledge Mobilities

Ayala Levin, “The Village Within: An Alternative Genealogy of the Urban Village,” Journal of Architecture 23: 3 (2018) 392-417

Arturo Almandoz, "Towards Brasilia & Ciudad Guayana: Development, Urbanization & Regional Planning in Latin America, 1940s–1960s," Planning Perspectives 31: 1 (2016) 31–53.

Sanjeev Vidyarthi, “Reimagining the American Neighborhood Unit for India,” in Healey and Upton, eds., Crossing Borders: International Exchange & Planning Practices (Routledge, 2010) 73-93.

Annapurna Shaw, "Town Planning in Postcolonial India, 1947-65: Chandigarh Re-examined," Urban Geography 30:8 (2009) 857-878.

Michelle Provoost, "Exporting New Towns: The Welfare City in Africa," in Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete, Dirk van den Heuvel, eds., Architecture and the Welfare State (Routledge, 2014) 277-297.

7) Oct 14: Control and Freedom

Reyner Banham, Paul Barker, Peter Hall, Cedric Price, "Non-Plan Experiment in Freedom," New Society (March 20, 1969) 435-443

Wouter Vanstiphout, "Ideology as an Achilles Heel: Visionary Urban Planning in Amsterdam and Teheran," in Provoost, ed., New Towns for the 21^st Century, 46-57.

Alan Hess, "Discovering Irvine: A Radical Alternative to Suburban Design and a Boldly Rationalized Refinement," Places Journal (October 2014).

J. Mark Souther, "Suburban Swamp: The Rise and Fall of Planned New Town Communities in New Orleans East," Planning Perspectives, 23 (April 2008) 197–219.

Kerry Cupers, “Programming the Villes Nouvelles,” The Social Project: Housing Postwar France (2014) 183-222.

8) Oct 21: Paper proposal discussions

9) Oct 28: Types

Rachel Keaton, "Songjiang New City, China" & "Tin Shui Wai, Hong Kong," in Rising in the East: Contemporary New Towns in China (International New Town Institute, 2011) 354-403.

Xiangming Chen et. al., "Localizing the Production of Global Cities: A Comparison of New Town Developments Around Shanghai and Kolkata," City & Community 8:4 (2009) 433-63.

Maroš Krivý, "Towards a Critique of Cybernetic Urbanism: The Smart City and the Society Of Control," Planning Theory (2016) 1-20.

10) Nov 4: ELECTION DAY

Part 3: Futures

11) Nov 11: GOVERNANCE, Municipal, State, Regional, Colonial, Welfare,

Michelle Provoost et. al., "Governing a New Town" in City in a Box, Volume 34 (2012) 102-117.

Luis F. Alvarez León and Jovanna Rosen, "Technology as Ideology in Urban Governance," Annals of the American Association of Geographers 110 (2020) 497-506.

Miguel Valdez, Matthew Cook, Helen Roby, "Epistemic (In)justice in a Smart City: Proto-Smart and Post-Smart Infrastructures for Urban Data," in Debra Mackinnon, Ryan Burns, and Victoria Fast, eds., Digital (In)Justice in the Smart City (Toronto 2023) 146-161.

12) Nov 18: Smart and Anti-Smart?

Nancy Odendaal, "Smart Innovation at the Margins: Learning from Cape Town and Kibera," in Andrew Karvonen, Federico Cugurullo and Federico Caprotti, eds., Inside Smart Cities: Place, Politics and Urban Innovation (Routledge, 2018) 243-55.

Hug March and Ramon Ribera-Fumaz, "Barcelona: From Corporate Smart City to Technological Sovereignty," in Andrew Karvonen, Federico Cugurullo and Federico Caprotti, eds., Inside Smart Cities: Place, Politics & Urban Innovation (Routledge, 2018) 229-40.

Pádraig R. Carmody, James T. Murphy, Richard Grant and Francis Y. Owusu, "Fantasy Urbanization in Africa: The Political Economy of Heterotopias," in The Urban Question in Africa: Uneven Geographies of Transition (2024) 76-91.

Kola Heyward-Rotimi, "Corporate Afrofuturism: Development Strategies for African Smart Cities," Mediapolis 8: 1 (2023).

13) Nov 18: Platform Futures? Stack, Platformization, algorithms

Anke Strüver and Sybille Bauriedl, eds., Platformization of Urban Life: Towards a Technocapitalist Transformation of European Cities (transcript 2022), excerpt.

Sarah Barns, Platform Urbanism: Negotiating Platform Ecosystems in Connected Cities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) excerpt.

Irene Bronsvoort and Justus L Uitermark, "Seeing the Street through Instagram: Digital Platforms and the Amplification of Gentrification," Urban Studies 59, no. 14 (November 2022) 2857–74.