URBS 303 - Advanced Debates in Urban Studies

Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2018/19a: Global Ghetto: Ethnic Geographies of Divided Cities. (Same as GEOG 303) Global cities have long been divided by their ethnic geographies– spatial divisions of class, race, national origin, religion, gender, and other sources of status and identity. This multidisciplinary seminar explores how and why urban space has become inscribed by such ethnic differences, both historically and in our contemporary globalized world. We consider ideals of ethnic integration and realities of segregation; migratory processes and congregation by choice; alternative discourses of assimilation, multiculturalism, and transnationalism; and the formal and informal mechanisms that maintain – and those that undermine – urban inequality in what Mike Davis calls our “planet of slums.” After tracing origins of the Jewish ghetto in medieval Europe, we turn to how the ghetto has been applied successively to European immigrant, African-American, and other ethnic enclaves of U.S. cities. Controversies concerning gentrification and displacement in New York City’s Harlem, Chinatown, and East Village, and in San Francisco’s Mission District, provide contemporary examples for discussion. To provide global cross-cultural comparison, we also examine the informal favela communities of Brazil and the urban slums of India. In addition to the social sciences, we also consider literary and artistic perspectives on urban murals, graffiti, and other cultural movements. Field trips examine such issues in New York City and Poughkeepsie. Brian Godfrey and Tyrone Simpson.

Topic for 2018/19b: Design, Disability, and the Demos: Critical Access Studies and the Right to the City. This seminar engages critical disability studies as a lens through which to investigate the spatial politics of urban everyday life in the contemporary United States–and to imagine the world otherwise. Through a series of readings, projects, and speculative design provocations, we examine the structures and practices that constitute ordinary urban life, and the forms of collective life they enable or disable. We interrogate the extensive network of supports–roads and bricks, pipes and wires, screens and cables, services and protocols–that produce the phantasmatic autonomy of a normative urban subject. We ask: why do only some forms of vulnerability and interdependence command the infrastructures of the commons? What does the Just City look like–and feel and sound like–when centered in the experience of non-conforming bodies and minds? Informed by recent art, activism and scholarship in critical disabilities studies, feminist and queer theory and critical urban studies, students engage the themes of the course through a series of individual and collaborative projects.

Periodically throughout the semester, we are joined in our work by Sara Hendren, Artist, Designer, and Researcher in Residence at Olin College of Engineering, and Spring 2019 Mellon Endowed Anne McNiff Tatlock ‘61 Faculty Fellow in Multidisciplinary Studies. Enrollment is limited and by permission. Please email lbrawley@vassar.edu

One 3-hour period.