AP/SOSC 1733 6.00

World Of Cities: Journey Through Urban Space And Time

This course considers our contemporary urban and urbanizing world. For the first time in history, more than half the world's population lives in cities. How has this happened? What's going on in these cities? What do cities in different parts of the world have in common? Why are they different?

Students are introduced to cities around the world through images, films, and stories, as well as scholarly texts, and are encouraged to think about the ways in which different cities and their unique urban cultures produce different everyday life experiences.
The course introduces some of the questions that underlie the field of the Urban Studies - what makes cities a different kind of human settlement? - and offers an historical overview of the development of cities into the mega urban regions that are a particular feature of the contemporary urban world. We explore urban issues and their spatial expression such as poverty and inequality, urban communities, migration, municipal governance and civil society, urban networks and globalization, downtowns and suburbs, nature and cities, urban icons, the role of the city in art, cities and consumption, urban environments, and so on.