Urban Studies 200 / Geography 250
Welcome to the City!
Cities represent the very best and the worst of the human condition. E. Barbara Phillips, one of the most insightful urbanists of our time, opens her important book City Lights with an imaginative suggestion:
"If you close your eyes and think about the city, what do you visualize? Sleek skyscrapers? Great libraries and good food? New ideas and world-changing inventions? Walt Whitman's Brooklyn Bridge and Gustav Eiffel's tower? Rappers rhyming? Fans cheering for the home team? Trendy fashions and diverse pleasures? Or do you envision a bomb blast in Oklahoma City and a poison-gas attack in Tokyo? Short-tempered drivers honking in gridlock? People lining up at the soup kitchen? Heatless rooms with rats and roaches? Smells of Lysol and body sweat at homeless shelters? High schoolers hiding guns in the hallways? Chilling crimes and petty irritations? People sleeping, perhaps dying, on the snowy streets of Stockholm and St. Paul? Children living in tenements and tracts, dumpsters and vans? Or estates with signs threatening 'Armed Response'?
Perhaps your vision encompasses both urban glories and dilemmas." (E. Barbara Phillips, 1996. City Lights: Urban-Suburban Life in the Global Society, Second Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 3-4).
Phillips' writing hits you right in the face with all the good, bad, and ugly, doesn't it? Personally, I'm an optimist -- and so I hope you think of the urban glories, all the joys, excitements, and energies of the city, and that the negative images recede into the background. What is clear, however, is that cities help to magnify, concentrate, and intensify whatever is happening in society.
Urban studies is the field devoted to understanding this process. It is interdisciplinary, which means that there are exciting discussions about cities among all sorts of people and scholars -- historians, sociologists, geographers, political scientists, anthropologists, economists, planners, architects ... the list goes on. Indeed, the range of people who study urban topics is so vast, and the words used by different experts are so varied, that it sometimes seems impossible to identify where urban studies begins and where it ends.
All definitions of academic subjects are, to some degree, artificial ways of simplifying the beautiful complexity of inquiry and learning. But if we absolutely had to come up with a clear definition of urban studies, what would it look like? Three definitions are most useful.
First, urban studies can easily be defined by its object of inquiry -- people, places, and processes found in cities. So our subject might be said to focus on what's happening in the four hundred cities in the world with populations of at least one million, or perhaps just the nineteen "city-regions" with more than ten million people. Yet other questions immediately appear: does urban studies include suburban areas, places where "anti-urban angst" often prevails? Does it consider rural areas that are deeply shaped by their interactions with big cities? (I respond to these questions with an enthusiastic 'yes,' but not everyone agrees.)
Second, the field can be defined by its approach. Urban studies is a vibrant and rich blend of theories and methods drawn from a variety of formal disciplines. But all of these theories and methods are bound together by the attempt to understand multi-faceted phenomena in and of the city. This means that urbanists approach their work by using whatever tools seem to work best for the specific question at hand. That sounds like a statement of the obvious, and indeed it is. But the subtle point is this: because cities are multi-faceted, complex, and defined by difference or even conflict, then the approach used by urban studies researchers necessarily has these features as well. Beware of anyone who tells you that There is One Right Way to Study Cities.
Another complication is that the goal of understanding cannot be divorced from the desire for action, for progressive change to improve cities and urban life. Consider how Richard LeGates and Frederic Stout survey the field:
"'Urban Studies' is the term commonly used to refer to the academic study of cities. Knowledge about cities generated by social scientists and others is sometimes taught in a single program, sometimes dispersed among academic departments. The goal of these courses is primarily to teach students to understand cities, only secondarily to empower them to change cities. On the other hand, professional city planning, town planning, and regional planning courses explicitly train students to work as city planners. Often planning courses are taught as part of graduate or undergraduate professional degree programs; sometimes as part of geography, architecture, or departments in the social sciences. ... We feel planning and policy should be informed by understanding and that studying urban planning and policy can enhance understanding." (Richard T. LeGates and Frederic Stout (2003). "Introduction." In LeGates and Stout, editors, The City Reader, Third Edition. New York: Routlege, 1-5, quote from pp. 2-3.)
A third way of answering this question is a bit more realistic, and perhaps more honest as well. Our field is defined in large part by the actual scholarly activities of its protagonists. And so things like circumstance, context, history, and personalities matter just as much as abstract principles, theories, and definitions. As one illustration, consider the circumstances around the birth of perhaps the most prominent journal in the field, Urban Affairs Review. The journal was established in 1965 by the co-founder and president of Sage Publications, "during days of urban unrest, protest over the Vietnam war, and a growing consensus that the condition of cities, in the United States and elsewhere, demanded concerted attention." Sara Miller McCune, the publisher, was concerned at the time "that publications in the social sciences did not actively reflect the urban world -- they didn't cross disciplinary lines to study what was fully happening in, say, cities." Miller McCune also launched a series of ambitious "Annual Reviews" that gradually became a "type of virtual community of interdisciplinary scholarly study directed at social critique and action" as well as a deep concern for the intricacies of public policy. (Sallie A. Marston and David C. Perry (1999), "From the Series Editors," in Robert A. Beauregard and Sophie Body-Gendrot, editors, The Urban Moment: Cosmopolitan Essays on the Late-Twentieth Century City. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, ix-xii, quotes from p. x, p. xi.)
As noted above, however, all disciplinary boundaries and definitions are somewhat artificial. My own bias is to approach urban studies less as an "object" and more as a lens -- a way of seeing the world from an 'urban' perspective. I have little doubt that this perspective will become more widespread and more important: a few years ago, global population estimates suggested that for the first time in human history, an outright majority of the world's people lived in urban areas. For the forseeable future, nearly all of the world's projected population growth will take place in urban areas. In many ways, therefore, the general questions and challenges for human civiliization are becoming distinctively urban questions and challenges. So we have a lot of fascinating and important things to explore...!
Above: Downtown Vancouver, June 2008; Below: Abandoned Packard Plant, Detroit, Michigan, July 2010 (Elvin Wyly).
CopyLeft 2013 Elvin K. Wyly
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Schedule
Below is our schedule of topics and readings. Please complete the required reading before coming to class. The tabs on the left side of the page will give you access to the slides I show in class. The tabs on the right side will give you access to more detailed notes and thoughts; you are not required to read these additional notes before coming to class, but you should look through them when preparing to write your independent project, and when preparing for the essay portion of the final examination. If this is your first time here, please read these terms of use.
Depending on when you're reading this page, you might notice that some of the tabs are not yet available; this class is not an assembly line built on a theology of pedagogical predestination. Cities and urban studies changes each year, and we need to update things! If you want to look ahead, then 1) read the textbook, and/or 2) see the schedule for last year.
Tuesday, September 3. UBC Imagine Day. Course web page.
Thursday, September 5. Course introduction. Phillips, pp. xxiii-xxix.
Saturday, September 7. Optional Walking Tour of Vancouver.
Tuesday, September 10. Paths to understanding the city. Phillips, pp. 3-18.
Thursday, September 12. Disciplines and the city. Phillips, pp. 37-44, and then any one of the discipline subsections between pp. 45-65.
Tuesday, September 17. Social science, public debate, and urban studies. Phillips, pp. 74-95.
Thursday, September 19. Ancient and preindustrial cities. Phillips, pp. 106-115.
Tuesday, September 24. Contemporary urbanization and global city-systems. Phillips, pp. 148-159, or Scott (2011).
Thursday, September 26. Defining urban community. Phillips, pp. 166-187.
Tuesday, October 1. Midterm examination.
Thursday, October 3. Community in the exploding metropolis. Phillips, pp. 196-203.
Tuesday, October 8. Suburbia. Read Phillips, pp. 218-226, before class.
Thursday, October 10. Race, ethnicity, and urban identities. Phillips, pp. 300-312.
Tuesday, October 15. Immigration and the metropolis. Phillips, pp. 261-270, 283-285.
Thursday, October 17.
Tuesday, October 22. Class and the city. Project submission date. Phillips, pp. 341-359.
Thursday, October 24. First. Nation. City. Read: Evelyn J. Peters (2001). "Geographies of Aboriginal People in Canada." The Canadian Geographer 45(1), 138-144.
Tuesday, October 29. Nature's Metropolis. Read the first three pages of Erik Swyngedouw (2006). "Circulations and Metabolisms: (Hybrid) Natures and (Cyborg) Cities." Science as Culture 15(2), 105-121.
Thursday, October 31. Frameworks of Urban Governance.
Tuesday, November 5. City political machines, I: History and theory. Phillips, pp. 464-476.
Thursday, November 7. Community power. Phillips, pp. 493-503.
Tuesday, November 12. City political machines, II: Case study, Harold Washington vs. the Chicago machine. Project submission date.
Thursday, November 14. Transit World City: Transportation Planning and Globalizing Cities.
Tuesday, November 19. Guest lecture:
Thursday, November 21. Guest lecture:
Tuesday, November 26. Guest lecture: Emily Rosenman
Thursday, November 28. Conclusions and reflections: An urban future. Phillips, pp. 675-678.
Last day of classes: Friday, November 29. Examination period: Wednesday, December 4 - Wednesday, December 18.
elviNotes™
Date; Topic; Read Before Class.
Davie Street, Vancouver, August 2012
Slides
