Urban Design & Planning 200: Introduction to Urbanization
Spring Quarter
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This course introduces you to cities. What are cities? Where do they come from? How do they work? And, crucially, how can cities be better than they are today? In investigating these questions, we will explore the spatial, economic, cultural, political, and social aspects of cities, as well as the relations among them. We will also examine case studies drawn from both the global North and South that will help us see how the ideas we explore are being worked out in actual practice.
Community, Environment, and Planning 301: The Idea of Community
Fall Quarter
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In this course, we explore community by examining dystopian fiction: Plato's Republic, Zamyatin's We, Orwell's 1984, Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven, and a few other works. We reflect on our reactions to this work to help us better understand what we think a good community entails.
Community, Environment, and Planning 461: Ethics and Identity
Winter Quarter
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Wittgenstein once said, "If a [person] could write a book on Ethics which really was a book on Ethics, this book would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books in the world." Maybe no one has quite done that yet, but a few have come close, people like Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hume, Mill, Kant, and (especially) Nietzsche and Nel Noddings. In this course we try to digest those classics, and then near the end we explore some of their distinct limitations by investigating work in feminist ethics.
Urban Design & Planning 592: Planning Theory
Winter Quarter
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Planning theory concerns itself with the ideas of planning. Given that every plan is underlain, and even driven by, ideas, it is essential for all planners to be critically literate in planning theory. Being literate involves seriously examining and understanding the arguments of important theorists. Being critical means subjecting those arguments to sustained scrutiny, both from your own perspective, and from the perspectives of other planning theorists. The principal goal of this course is to develop your critical literacy in planning theory.
Urban Design & Planning 567: Democracy, Citizenship, and Participation in the City
This course is not currently being taught, but will return again in the future.
Most recent syllabus
This course explores democracy and the city. More specifically, it examines the decisions that shape the geography of the city. Think of any project or process that is reshaping the spatial and social relations in a given city. How are the decisions being made? How democratic are those decisions? How democratic should they be? How can they be made more democratically? In general, what role should "the public" or "the people" play in determining the future of the city?