Urban Studies

Students explore the relationships of architecture and city planning to ideology, society and politics. Specifically, the course entails the development of these relationships in the context of Berlin across a number of different political eras, including the Empire, the Weimar Republic, National Socialism, the Cold War and the subsequent time which has elapsed since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Course contents range from shorter texts and lectures to long, involved city explorations and possibly exhibition visits.

This reading, field-trip, and discussion course exposes a range of contemporary geographic narratives, and then works to apply the narratives while exploring daily life in Jerusalem with and for diverse populations. The course examines a series of readings introducing frameworks including the ordinary city; the global, world and capital city; the Zionist city; and the city as shaped by history and religion. The course also weaves a set of four field trips in Jerusalem, three guided and one self-guided. It provides a platform for informed, critical, and multi-perspective discussion about contemporary spatial practices in Jerusalem. The course also encourages challenging values and perspectives while exploring the impact of ideology on the built environment and on the range of Jerusalemites.

Using literature from sociology, urban planning, and geography, this course explores how cities have been employed to foster economic development and how they have reshaped social relations. Though the role of cities in development are explored primarily through an examination of Korea’s development history, examples are also drawn from throughout Asia and in some cases from the West.

This course focuses on how collective action and social movements have sought to raise awareness and effect change in migration and identity issues. The course is designed to engage students in a multi-disciplinary, experiential research project on migration issues through a series of set themes related to collective action. It aims to better understand the forms of collective action on the on the issues of migration, based on the in-depth study of the Paris experience. It critically addresses concepts of integration, community, ethnicity, citizenship, asylum, and migrant rights by systematically putting them to the test through social and political mobilizations. As such, it will allow students to explore migrants’ diverse experiences as they interact with societies, culture, and institutions with a strong emphasis on the role played by activism. Given the predominance of migration in the nation’s capital city, a wide range of opportunities for case studies to develop research projects, crossing various disciplines such as history, political science, sociology, literature, journalism, and visual studies on social movements about migrants, migration and identity, and migration in Paris. The Parisian field offers myriad case studies on these issues as the undocumented migrants’ social movements, associations for the defense of migrants’ rights, aid and support institutions for foreigners, as well as organizations created by communities of origin. This is why, by focusing on the research dimension, this course intends to rely on, from a pedagogical perspective, meetings with social actors and collection of first-hand data. Research papers deal with collective action motivated by positions and identities related to migration, ethnicity, religion, anti-racism, nationalism, and diversity. The focus on migration and identity in an historical perspective is particularly relevant to developing research skills and service-learning opportunities for students.
 

Since the mid-18th century, medicine has become a major economic and political concern for those who have governed London, and a profession with extraordinarily far-reaching authority in the management and even definition of human life. The very landscape of London has been framed as a source of sickness, temptation, and pollution.  This course explores the health landscapes of London in both Victorian and contemporary times. This course compares the landscapes of disease and (im)morality of Victorian London with contemporary London, accompanied by an examination of how the intervening world wars and establishment of the welfare state shaped the social and physical landscape of the city in relation to health. This course also includes out of the classroom activites allowing students to explore the history of health, disease, and medicine in four very different London landscapes.

This course explores the political and artistic aims and effects of non-theatrical performance in the 20th century and contemporary urban environment. It explores how the city is sometimes conceived as a dystopian site of potentially enormous social oppression. And it examines everyday, artistic, and activist performative responses to this potential subjection, responses which imagine the city as, instead, a utopian site of personal and social liberation. Students contextualize and historicize our analysis through studying various theoretical analyses of urban experience (e.g. Baudelaire, Benjamin, Debord, Lefebvre) as well as a variety of artistic practices (e.g. everyday interventions, activism, public art). Throughout the course, students work to map the ideas and practices we encounter, many originally grounded in Paris, in our own experiences of London. The course concludes by imagining what performance might do next to contest the particular challenges of living in the city now and to explore and exploit its opportunities.

This course introduces the spatial effects the law has in everyday life's urban spaces, problems related to geography in general, and cities in specific. It examines the relationship between space and law, and how law and legal theory are essential starting points in understanding cities and vice versa. The course also confronts legal and social theories using architecture, literature, film, art, and legal ethnographic approaches. It addresses inquiries such as how law creates space; how national and international laws construct cities; how law, literature, and film represent cities; and how it is possible to do legal research in this field.