Urban Studies

This course focuses on sociological concepts and methods through the lens of the city. It applies sociological concepts to the city that can be seen while walking around, such as the city of buildings and people; and those less noticeable, such as the city of sentiments, conflict, traffic flows, bike messengers, sewage networks, asset prices and municipal taxation, and animals and nature. This course uses key sociological readings, case studies, and topics in the news to study the city as a complex space where buildings, people, animals, laws, policies, and international financial flows intersect to produce our lived experience. It focuses on close reading of texts, understanding the key argument of each text, and applying concepts to the real world; and covers the key strategies and skills of academic writing as students produce a research paper based on a city of their choice. The first part of the course explores foundational texts, while the rest of the course addresses specific questions related to housing markets, social policy, violence, drugs, environmental change, segregation, urban infrastructure, and urban regulations.
 

Paris has long been recognized as a center for both revolutionary activism and innovative artistic production. This course explores the coming together of these two domains through diverse visual manifestations of social justice and advocacy produced and/or displayed in Paris from the Revolution to the present, including painting, sculpture, architecture, performance, installations, photography, video, posters, graffiti, and street art. Students explore the ways in which the urban landscape bears the scars of revolutionary destruction and serves as a showcase for politically engaged production, housed in its museums or visible to all on the streets. The instructional format consists of both lectures and group site visits throughout the city, to venues including public and private museums, which are studied both for their content, architecture, and their politics of display; galleries, artist collectives, and Parisian neighborhoods with outdoor art displays.

Addressing urban change and apprehending the complexity of cities demands a distinct interdisciplinary approach across the arts, sciences, social sciences, and humanities, each bringing their own theoretical and methodological perspectives to bear on a phenomenon that has traditionally been studied from within disciplinary silos. This course acknowledges the complexity of cities as distinctive material environments for social life, raising questions of how the different dimensions of the built (and imagined) urban environment permeate everyday experiences of the contemporary city. 

This course focuses on the French art of strolling aimlessly through the city from the late 19th century to present. Exploring the intersection between the city walker and the urban environments navigated on foot, this course provides a unique perspective on the role of public space in the construction of urban modernity in France. The course adopts an explicitly class-, race-, and gender-critical approach to the study of this able-bodied practice that has traditionally been associated with a certain Baudelairean archetype of bourgeois masculinity. The course investigates who has the right to linger and be seen in public space, how the act of strolling aimlessly through the city intersects with other forms of societal privilege, and when and where wandering becomes a means of protest or resistance. By tracing the itineraries and embodied geographies that are traversed in this practice, this course creates a map of social mobility and urban modernity in the ever-evolving French city.