Sand: Modern City Syllabus, Fall 2013Page 7 of 8

APPROACHES TO THE MODERN CITYJordan Sand (sandj@georgetown.edu)

This document is a draft. Further topics, readings and research assignments will be detailed later.

This course approaches the subject of the modern city comparatively and thematically. Participants will be asked to submit and present to the class frequent short reports with data, analysis, and bibliography on particular cities. The assembled material will form the basis for discussion of global comparisons.The scholarly literature on the modern city is very broad. Most urban history, particularly work written in English, has tended to focus on Europe and North America and has relied on Eurocentric assumptions about the nature of modernity. Urban historians have treated the city as a bounded and readable entity. They have focused on the influence of planners and planning, whether as progressive or as destructive forces. Many cities outside Europe and America dont fit this approach well. Meanwhile, a new sociological literature has emerged since the late twentieth century on megacities, global cities, the information city and even the death of the city. This writing sets the problem of urbanism in a truly global frame for the first time. But it tends to assume that the urban phenomena emerging at present are fundamentally anomalous. It therefore lacks longer historical perspective. Is the historical break in the history of cities as complete as the gap between these two literatures would lead us to believe? This course will draw from both of these literatures as well as from our own investigations to see if the history of urban modernity might be structured differently.

Themes have been chosen with two things in mind: 1. The focus is on the material and spatial aspects of the city, or the expression of social issues in material and spatial form.2. One of our central questions will be: what kind of urban history can we construct without assuming the perspective of Euro-American urban sociology and planning history? Although a substantial part of the reading will deal with Europe and North America, the primary purpose of the reading will be to provide questions for considering other cities comparatively.This will be a discussion-centered class, focused on student contributions.Overview of AssignmentsEach student will choose one city to work on throughout the semester. The choices must all be major cities about which scholarly writing is available. Weekly assignments will begin with reading of a book or two or three articles. These will form the background and basis for class discussion. In addition, students will be expected to submit a short report (one or two pages with at least three items of bibliography) treating the theme of that week in relation to the cities they are studying individually. If there is no relevant material available for your city one week, you may choose another city for that week or submit a longer report on the theme for the following week. As time permits, these reports will be presented to the group in class. Students should expect to give short presentations based on their reports frequently.At the end of the semester, each student will submit a 15-page review of the literature and historical data on one city based on the reading and short reports presented throughout the semester.Rough grading breakdown:General participation: 30%Reports/presentations:35%Final report:35%

SCHEDULESession 1 IntroductionReview of syllabus and course goals. Discussion of research methods and students choices of cities to focus on; discussion of building a collective bibliography and urban data file.

Session 2 Preliminary assignment: introduce your city and resources on your city (major works, on-line archives, etc.)

Session 3 The City as EcosystemTopics: Impact of the environment on settlement and city form; impact of the city on the environment. Resources and the boundaries of the urban region. Water and provisioning. Urban flora and fauna.Readings: Martin Melosi, The Historical Dimension of Urban Ecology William Cronon, Annihilating Space: Meat, in Natures Metropolis Questions for individual city projects: What kind of ecosystem is your city? How has it affected its surroundings?

Session 4 The City as Ordered UniverseTopic: The master plan and its aftermath.Readings: Crouch and Mundigo, The Laws of Indies Setha Low, Cultural Meaning of the PlazaQuestions: Does your city have a single overall plan? When was it made and with what aims? How much was realized? What remains of it today?

Session 5 The City Under Threat 1Natural DisastersAs soon as people began to gather themselves in cities they put themselves at risk. One of the great challenges for the construction and management of cities has been protection against natural hazards. A proposed definition of the modern city: an attempt to create a zero-hazard environment. Yet it is obvious this has always failed.Topics: Fire, flood and earthquake. Disease.Readings: Susan Kuretsky, Jan van der Heyden and the Origins of Modern Firefighting (Amsterdam), in Flammable CitiesGreg Bankoff, A Tale of Two Cities: the Pyro-Seismic Morphology of Nineteenth-Century Manila (Manila), in Flammable CitiesQuestions: How has your city been affected by natural hazards or epidemic disease? What measures were taken to eliminate these problems or mitigate their effects, when? What side effects did those measures have?

Session 6 The City Under Threat 2the City and WarWar, terror and aerial bombing.Readings: Kenneth Hewitt, Place AnnihilationStephen Graham, Postmortem City*additional reading: Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing*additional reading: le Corbusier, The Radiant City Questions: How has war affected the history of the city? Are its marks visible? Have the techniques of modern warfareincluding terror, broadly definedshaped the city or urban policy?Session 7 The City Under Threat 3Tokyo, 1923Topic: The Great Kanto Earthquake and Tokyo. Session 8 Squatter Cities, Peasant Cities, MegacitiesReadings: Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, 1-120Video: Lagos/Koolhaas*additional reading:James Holston, Autoconstruction in Working-Class Brazil Bryan Roberts, Cities of Peasants Bryan Roberts, The Making of Citizens: Cities of Peasants RevisitedQuestions: Where do the poorest live in your city? How did they get there? Are there or were there in the past districts of housing built by the occupants themselves?Session 9 The City as Ecosystem 2WasteGarbage and nightsoilhow modern cities transformed human products into waste. A proposed definition of the city: a settlement that generates more waste than it can manage internally. Recycling and the attempt to return to sustainability. Scavengers and the informal economy of waste and recycling.Readings: Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Imagination, 1-8, 27-34, 114-121, 222-232Susan Hanley, Urban Sanitation and Physical Well-Being, in Everyday Things in Premodern JapanMartin Medina, The Worlds Scavengers, vii-xi, 32-61, 183-197, 229-235 Questions: When was a sewer system built in your city, and what was the context? Where did it go? What role has landfill played in the development of your city?Session 10 The City as Real EstateA proposed definition of the modern city: a settlement shaped by the abstract needs of real estate.Readings: Carol Willis, Form Follows FinancePietro Nivola, Laws of the Landscape: How Policies Shape Cities in Europe and America.Questions: How has the shape of architecture in your city been determined by municipal or state regulation? How has it been determined by the real estate market?*additional topic: Real estate bubbles and how urban real estate marketssustain capitalism

*additional reading (/viewing): David Harvey on real estate bubbles; recent news reports on youtube about Chinese ghost cities.

Session 11 The City as Data 1Populations and GovernanceThe survey and the map. A proposed definition of the modern city: a city that whose people are known to authorities through social statistics. Beginning in the 18th century, according to Michel Foucault, governments began to manage whole populations through statistical study of all aspects of everyday life. This new mode of biopolitics began in cities, with studies of factory workers health, and mapping of mortality, crime and suicide. To almost every branch of government today, the city is first a population and a space with measurable traits. The origins of social statistics. Edwin Chadwick and the first cholera map.Questions: When did authorities begin collecting quantitative data about the population of your city? What did they measure? Can you find an example of an early survey of some social phenomenon? What does it tell us about population and governance?Session 12 The City as Data 2Mapping and Micro-level Social SurveysNon-hegemonic, experimental urban investigations. A look at Kon Wajirs Modernology. Assignment: Find a historical or contemporary map whose makers you can identify and explain what kind of knowledge of the city it represents.Assignment: What sort of modernology might we do today, using contemporary technology? What purpose might it serve?Reading: Tom Gill, Kon Wajiro, Modernologist; Akasegawa Genpei, Hyperart Thomasson.Session 13 The City as Social BodyModern cities and the politics of the mass, the public square and the public sphere. What do cities need public space for? An incident: the Shinjuku Station West Exit Underground Plaza occupation of summer 1969.Readings: Wu Hung, Tiananmen: A Political History of Monuments in Remaking Beijing; Jordan Sand, Hiroba: The Public Square and the Boundaries of the Commons.Questions: Where are the key public spaces in your city? How have people used them? How are they restricted? Are the places where large numbers gather planned spaces? What has happened when people massed in some urban open space? Is there some key moment in the history of public space? Is this site the defining space of politics in your city, or does politics today happen elsewhere?

Session 14 Urban ComparisionsAssignment: get together with two classmates and draw up one or more tables or charts comparing some key issues and data about your cities. Be sure that your material is historically consistent.Session 15 Wrap Up