SOC 290
Urban Space, Culture, and Power Spring 2014
Division II Writing Skills Exploring Diversity Initiative
This is not the current course catalog

This course takes as its starting point the premise that the urban built environment shapes social relations in complex ways. We will tease out the implications of this assertion and address two central questions with which scholars of urban life have wrestled. First, does city life engender certain kinds of social relationships or forms of personhood? And second, can one reshape society by changing the physical spaces people inhabit? To answer the first question, we will read classic theories about urban life and compare them to ethnographic case studies, paying close attention to the question of whether urban living leads to the breakdown of traditional social ties and to the production of “modern” rationalities. To answer the second question, we will examine the politics of urban restructuring, studying struggles over urban space to understand different constellations of power from the colonial era to the globalizing present. We will tease out the ideologies that have underpinned colonial and postcolonial urban projects, and we will examine the effects of urban redevelopment and residential segregation on urban residents. In the final section of the course, we will focus on the repositioning of cities as sites of capital investment, global economic integration, and elite consumption in the contemporary era. Throughout the course we will pay close attention to the role of urban space in the production and reproduction of social inequalities.