URBS 340 - Advanced Urban and Regional Studies

Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2024/25a: Preserving Whose City? Place Memory, Identity, and Power. (Same as GEOG 340) “Memoria” was a classical muse, symbolizing society’s existence in time and space, thereby linking the past, present, and future. In the 19^th century, collective memory served “imagined communities” of nationalism, modernism, and urbanism. During the “memory boom” of the 20^th century arose issues of genocide, holocaust, human rights, multiculturalism, and historic preservation. Rather than being simple and transparent, collective memory has served a variety of interests and purposes. Memory now fosters place identity, tourism, and symbolism in our globalized and urbanized world. Cities recognize heritage sites, historic districts, landmarks, monuments, and memorials as strategies of placemaking – social, spatial, and symbolic processes by which distinctive places arise. While not a new phenomenon, placemaking now increasingly results from promotional branding campaigns. We consider both official historic designations and grassroots efforts of “counter-memory” to recognize underappreciated and marginalized groups. After examining the theory and practice of historic preservation and placemaking, students carry out research on sites of their own choosing. Brian Godfrey.

Topic for 2024/25b: Cities and the Politics of Technology. (Same as GEOG 340 and STS 340) This seminar focuses on power and the politics of technology in modern cities. The class aims to put the contemporary urban scene of ubiquitous computing technology and data-driven forms of accumulation and decision making into critical perspective. It sketches out a history of the urban present in three main parts. The first examines how political technologies of social coordination, separation, surveillance, and planning constituted an apparatus of disciplinary power animating liberal capitalist cities. The second highlights the wartime emergence of novel techniques of control tied to computational technologies and explores how critiques of postwar urban planning figured a reconceptualization of cities as complex and self-organizing systems. The third probes the political character and social consequences of those market-based forms of technological urbanism that have taken hold in the internet era. Throughout the course of this semester, we will work to remain attuned to the ways in which technological devices, systems, and methods are simultaneously embedded within and constitutive of wider social relations and historically specific forms of power. John Elrick.

This course may be repeated for credit when the topic changes.

One 3-hour period.

Course Format: CLS