05101: History and Theory of Urban Interventions

Spring 2012 - SES-05101-00

Urban Planning and Design

Lecture - 4 credits

Tuesday Thursday 11:30 - 1:00

Gund Hall - Piper Auditorium

Neil Brenner, Professor of Urban Theory, Harvard Graduate School of Design

This class provides a high-intensity introduction to social scientific and historical-geographical

approaches to the process of capitalist urbanization and associated strategies to shape its sociospatial
and political-economic organization during the last two centuries. We survey theoretical debates
regarding (a) the nature of cities and the urban, (b) the historical geographies of urbanization and (c)
the nature of planning as a political-economic, societal and cultural project. Although we focus in
some detail on the ideas, visions and practices of urban, regional and territorial planners, we shall
embed their activities within the historically and geographically specific constraints, opportunities and
struggles associated with each of the major phases of modern capitalist urbanization and associated
formations of national state power. In thus proceeding, we explore the conflictual interaction of
capitalist firms / real estate developers, political institutions and social movements at various spatial
scales, and consequences of that interaction for the institutional, legal, spatial and ideological terrains of
planning.
In addition to attending lectures covering the major theoretical and interpretive issues, periodic
discussion sections with the Teaching Fellows will also be required. Additionally, students will work
collaboratively in small groups to explore some of the key episodes in the development of the fields of
urban, regional and territorial planning since the mid-19th century. Course requirements include this
group project as well as brief weekly reaction papers on the assigned readings and three short papers
(5-6 pages) on assigned topics.
Teaching Fellows

Brian Goldstein, bgoldst@gmail.com

Nikos Katsikis, katsikis@gsd.harvard.edu

Teaching Assistant

Sky Milner, skymilner@yahoo.com

Office hours
Thursdays, 3:15pm to 6:30pm, by appointment only. To schedule an appointment please email
neil.brenner.scheduling@gmail.com

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Please note that the schedule fills up rapidly during the semester; please send us your meeting request
with plenty of advance notice.
Course website
Unless otherwise noted, all course materials will be made available via the website. Please print your
own copies or download them to a device on which you can mark up / highlight the text and take
appropriate notes.
Background texts
The intellectual terrain covered in this class is vast, complex and controversial. Weekly reading
assignments correspond to those texts I will be discussing in the lectures. Rather than list
supplementary readings on a weekly basis, I strongly recommend the below texts, which offer a broad
and deep overview of the major issues covered in this course. I will often refer to sections of these texts
in framing our lectures and discussions. These texts also contain bibliographies that point towards more
detailed investigations and lines of inquiry. Students are strongly encouraged to use the below list as a
starting point for exploring the issues that most closely correspond to your own research interests and
practical agendas.
Each student is expected to purchase at least one of the below books, and to read it in its entirety during
the course of the semester. No matter which book you choose, you should coordinate your reading
progress with lecture and discussion topics in this class.
1. Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow. 3rd Edition. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995.
2. Susan Fainstein and Scott Campbell eds., Readings in Planning Theory. 2nd Edition. Cambridge,
Mass.: Blackwell, 2003.
3. Eugenie Birch ed., The Urban and Regional Planning Reader. New York: Routledge, 2009.
4. John Friedmann, Insurgencies: Essays in Planning Theory. New York: Routledge, 2011.
5. John Friedmann, Planning in the Public Domain. From Knowledge to Action. Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1987.
The below texts also provide useful overviews of the issues covered in this course and are highly
recommended.
History and theory of modern capitalist urban / regional development

Lewis Mumford, The City in History. New York: Harcourt, 1961.

Richard LeGates and Frederick Stout eds., The City Reader. 5th Edition. New York: Routledge,
2011.
Susan Fainstein and Scott Campbell eds., Readings in Urban Theory, 3rd Edition. Cambridge,
Mass.: Blackwell, 2011.
Phil Kasinitz ed., Metropolis: Center and Symbol of our Times. New York: NYU Press, 1995.
Edward Soja, Postmetropolis. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000.
David Harvey, The Urban Experience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.

Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson eds., The Blackwell City Reader. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell,
2010.
Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia. New York: Basic, 1987.
Robert Fogelsong, Planning the Capitalist City. Princeton University Press: Princeton, N.J., 1986.
John Friedmann and William Alonso eds., Regional Policy: Readings in Theory and Application.
Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1975.

Selected theoretical issues and debates in urban planning and the production/regulation of the built
environment

John Forester, Critical Theory, Public Policy and Planning Practice. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press,
1993.
Mike Douglass and John Friedmann eds., Cities for Citizens. Planning and the Rise of Civil Society.
New York: Wiley, 1998.
Peter Evans ed. Livable Cities? Urban Struggles for Livelihood and Sustainability. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002.
Peter Marcuse et. al. eds., Searching for the Just City. New York: Routledge, 2009.
Neil Brenner, Peter Marcuse and Margit Mayer eds., Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical
Urban Theory and the Right to the City. New York, Routledge, 2011.
Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore eds., Spaces of Neoliberalism: Urban Restructuring in Western
Europe and North America. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003.
Leonie Sandercock, Making the Invisible Visible: Towards a Multicultural Planning History. Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1998.
Leonie Sandercock, Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities. New York: Continuum, 2003.
Planetizen, Contemporary Debates in Urban Planning. Washington DC: Island Press, 2007.
Susan Fainstein and Lisa Servon eds., Gender and Planning. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 2005.
Tridib Banerjee and Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris eds., A Companion to Urban Design. New York:
Routledge, 2011.
James DeFilippis and Susan Saegert eds., The Community Development Reader. New York:
Routledge, 2008.

History of the planning profession in the USA and beyond

M. Christine Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City. The Myth of American City Planning. Cambridge,
Mass.: The MIT Press, 1986.
Mel Scott, American City Planning since 1890. Chicago: APA Planners Press, 1995.
Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press,
1991.
Robert Fishman ed., The American Planning Tradition: Culture and Policy. Washington, D.C.: The
Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2000.

Leland Roth ed., America Builds: Source Documents in American Architecture and Planning. New
York, 1983.
Anne Whiston Spirn, The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design. New York: Basic
Books, 1982.
Anthony Sutcliffe, Towards the Planned City: Germany, Britain, the United States and France,
1780-1914. Oxford: Blackwell, 1981.
Peter Newman and Andy Thornley eds., Urban Planning in Europe. London: Routledge, 1996.
Anthony D. King, Colonial Urban Development. London: Routledge, 1976.
John Reps, The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965.
Mary Corbin Sies and Christopher Silver, eds., Planning the Twentieth Century American City.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

Course requirements
(1) Regular attendance at all lectures and discussion sections. You are expected to have read all of the
assigned readings prior to the lecture for which they are assigned. My expectation is that you will
spend approximately two hours of reading time in preparation for each of our classes (four hours
per week). Schedule of discussion sections to be announced.
(2) Weekly reaction papers (RPs) offering a critical response to a key issue raised in one of the assigned
readings each week (to be submitted at the beginning of class each Thursday to your TF). These will
be due every week of the semester, with the following exceptions: (a) each of the three weeks in
which you have a major paper due (see assignment #3 below); and (b) the week in which your group
is reporting to the class (see assignment #4 below). This equates to a total of 8 RPs during the
course of the semester.
(3) Parts One, Two and Three of the course: for each part, you will complete a take home (5 page)
paper (3 papers total) on a topic selected from a list distributed by the instructor. The paper topics
will be handed out one week in advance of the deadlinesFebruary 21st, March 8th and March 29th.
These papers will be based entirely on the texts you will be reading for the coursethey are
analytical in nature and will not require any additional research.
(4) Part Four of the course: group collaborative project on a key episode, experiment or problematique
in the history of modern urban / regional / territorial planning. This includes responsibility for a
class presentation on your topic during the assigned week (including selection of key readings) as
well as a written group dossier (up to 20 pagesdue on the last day of class, 24th April). Details to
be announced.

SCHEDULE OF READINGS AND ASSIGNMENTS

24 January

(1)

Introduction to the class

John Friedmann, The good city: in defense of utopian thinking, in John Friedmann, Insurgencies:
Essays in Planning Theory. New York: Routledge, 2011, 144-161.
David Harvey, The right to the city, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 27, 4,
2003, 939-941.

THEORIZING THE CITY AND THE URBAN

The city has long been a key reference point for social life and political intervention, especially in the
modern capitalist world economy. More specifically, the city is generally understood to be a major
target or site for the field of interventions and projects we have come to know as planning. Yet
the nature of the city remains intensely contested among theorists, scholars and practitioners. This
section of the course surveys some of the broad contours of the debate, with specific reference to some
of the major 19th and 20th century attempts to fix the city as an analytic concept.

26 January

City/nature

Can the city be defined in opposition to nature? Is the city itself a form of produced nature? What
different concepts of nature are used in these texts, and how do such concepts stabilize or destabilize
understandings of cityness? Is nature itself a form of produced space or built environment?

Lewis Mumford, The culture of the city, in Philip Kasinitz ed., Metropolis. New York: NYU Press,
1995, 21-29.
Ian L. McHarg, The place of nature in the city of man, The Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science, 352, 1, 1964, 1-12.
Anne Whiston Spirn, Constructing nature: the legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted, in William Cronon
ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. New York: Norton, 1996, 91-113.

Also recommended:

Ian L. McHarg, The metropolitan region, in Eugenie Birch ed., The Urban and Regional Planning
Reader. New York: Routledge, 2009, 156-161.
Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964.
Matthew Gandy, Vicissitudes of urban nature: transitions and transformations at a Global Scale,
Radical History Review, 107, 2010, 178-183.
Matthew Gandy, Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2002.

31 January

City/countyside

The city is frequently defined through an implicit or explicit opposition to non-city realms of lifethe
rural and the countryside. In what ways do the authors conceive this opposition, and what are its
implications for their grasp of cityness? To what extent do the various authors substantive analyses of
historical transformations undermine the very opposition they seem to presuppose?

Robert Redfield, The folk society, American Journal of Sociology, 52, 4, 1947, 293-308.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, excerpts from The Communist Manifesto, included in Richard
Edwards, Michael Reich and Thomas E. Weisskopf eds., The Capitalist System. Englewood Cliffs, N.J:
Prentice Hall, 1972, 67-71.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, excerpts from The German Ideology, in Lawrence Simon ed., Karl
Marx: Selected Writings. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1994, 132-142.
William Cronon, Dreaming the metropolis, in Natures Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West.
New York: Norton, 1991, 23-54.

Also recommended:

William Cronon, Pricing the future: grain, in Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson eds., The Blackwell
City Reader. 2nd Edition. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 2010, 17-32.

2 February

The city as a form of life

Can the city be defined with reference to certain urbanistic forms of lifesocial routines, interactions,
experiences and conflictsthat necessarily occur within large, dense, heterogeneous settlement spaces?

Louis Wirth, Urbanism as a way of life, in Richard Sennett ed., Classic Essays on the Culture of
Cities. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1969, 143-164.

Also recommended:

Georg Simmel, "The metropolis and mental life," in Philip Kasinitz ed., Metropolis: Center and
Symbol of our Times. New York: NYU Press, 1995, 30-46.

7 February

Catch-up session plus planning session for Part Four of the class

In this session we will continue discussion of materials covered in the opening three lectures. The
remainder of the class will be devoted to planning for Part Four of the class. All students will be
assigned to a Group and you will be given time to begin consultations for your work together.

9 February

The city and the (il)logics of capitalism

Capitalism has generated historically specific forms of city-building, and its antagonisms, conflicts and
crisis-tendencies are expressed in urban built environments. The latter are in turn subjected to periodic,
extremely powerful transformative pressures through the economic crises and social struggles that
pervade the capitalist world system.

Friedrich Engels, "The Great Towns," in Richard LeGates and Frederic Stout eds., The City Reader. 3rd
Edition. New York: Routledge, 2003, 58-66.
David Harvey, "Money, time, space and the city," in The Urban Experience. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1989, 165-199.

14 February

The explosion of the city

Since at least the 1960s, scholars have forecast the dissolution of the city as a meaningful sociospatial
reference point due to large-scale processes of social, economic, demographic and territorial
restructuring. In what sense might the city be said to be disappearing? And, if this is the case, how
can we begin to map the differentiated geographies of political-economic life in the contemporary
world?

Lewis Mumford, The disappearing city, in Donald Miller ed., The Lewis Mumford Reader. Athens
and London: University of Georgia Press, 1995, 108-112.
John Friedmann, The urban field, Journal of the American Planning Association, 31, 4, 1965, 312320.
Henri Lefebvre, excerpts from The Urban Revolution, in Neil Brenner and Roger Keil eds., The Global
Cities Reader. New York: Routledge, 2006, 407-414.

Also recommended:

Frederick W. Coborn, The five-hundred-mile city, The World Today, 11, December 1906, included
in Becky Nicolaides and Andrew Wiese eds., The Suburb Reader. New York: Routledge, 2006, 81-83.
Jean Gottman, Megalopolis. The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States. Cambridge,
Mass.: The MIT Press, 1961.
Manuel Castells, Local and global: cities in the network society, Tijdschrift voor Economische en
Sociale Geografie, 93, 5, 548-558.
Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid, Planetary urbanization, in Matthew Gandy ed., Urban
Constellations. Berlin: Jovis, 2012, 10-13.

Note: topics for Paper #1 to be handed out today; due in class on 21 February.

(2)

URBAN SPACE/TIME: HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHIES OF URBANIZATION

Cities change in relation to broader political-economic, societal and cultural transformations, and these
transformations are in turn manifested powerfully within the built environments of cities: the latter are
never fixed or stable, but are continually modified through a range of processes, institutions and
struggles. However, analysts disagree dramatically regarding how best to conceptualize the causes,
expressions and consequences of urban restructuring. In this section of the course we survey some of
the main positions in this ongoing debate, and their implications for the strategies of planners and urban
inhabitants to mold and reshape the territorial landscape.

16 February

Demographic approaches and the geographies of population flow

Populations flow across the territorial landscape of the world, often concentrating together in great
clusters, but they also decentralize in patterns that defy simple geometrical description. To what extent
does tracking such population flows illuminate the processand geographyof urbanization?

Kingsley Davis, The origin and growth of urbanization in the world, American Journal of Sociology,
60, 5, 1955, 429-437.
Jean Gottmann, How large can cities grow?, in Jean Gottmann and Robert Harper eds., Since
Megalopolis: The Urban Writings of Jean Gottmann. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1990, 149-161.
Jay H. Moore and Rasna Warah, The state of the worlds cities, in Eugenie Birch ed., The Urban
and Regional Planning Reader. New York: Routledge, 2009, 7-13.

Also recommended:

Robert Fishman, The fifth migration, in Susan Fainstein and Scott Campbell eds., Readings in
Urban Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 2011, 73-89.
Lewis Mumford, The Fourth Migration, in Carl Sussman ed., Planning the Fourth Migration: The
Neglected Vision of the Regional Planning Association of America. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976.
Frederick Jackson Turner, The significance of the frontier in American history (1893), Available at:
http://www.h-net.org/~hst203/documents/turner.html

21 February

Ecological approaches and the struggle for space

Even as populations flow across the landscape, they also cluster together within determinate patterns to
form and transform neighborhoods, giving them distinctive, often durable characteristics that are
preserved over the years, decades or even longer. How can the neighborhood scale of urban sociality be
conceived, what are its main expressions in the built environment, and how and why is this scale
reorganized? To what degree does the metaphor of ecology illuminateor obscurethe forces at
work in such transformations?

Robert Ezra Park, Human Ecology, in Jan Lin and Christopher Mele eds., The Urban Sociology
Reader. New York: Routledge, 2005, 65-72.
Ernest W. Burgess, "The growth of the city," in Richard LeGates and Frederic Stout eds., The City
Reader. 3rd Edition. New York: Routledge, 2003, 156-163.

23 February

Cycles of capitalist development and the evolution of urban form

The capitalist form of urbanization subjects urban space to a logic of commodification in which
formations of the built environment (land, buildings, infrastructure, labor-power) are instrumentalized to
serve and intensify the process of capital accumulation. This abstraction of urban space is always
contested through class relations and through political struggles over the form, extent and social
management of commodification. Moreover, deep and endemic crisis-tendencies within the capitalist
system engender a periodicity to urban development: formations of urbanization at once mirror,
facilitate and constrain broader, world-scale dynamics of capital accumulation. What are the
explanatory contributions and limits of these class-, capital- and crisis-theoretical approaches to urban
restructuring?

David Gordon, "Capitalist development and the history of American cities," in William Tabb and
Larry Sawyers eds., Marxism and the Metropolis. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978, 25-63.
David Harvey, The urbanization of capital, in The Urban Experience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1989, 17-58.

28 February

Patterns of decentralization and recentralization

Agglomeration and dispersal are two mutually interdependent moments of metropolitan expansion that
have been unfolding since the late 19th century, leading to radically transformed landscapes of
urbanization across the world economy. Debates on industrial geography, suburbanization and
gentrification offer useful lenses through which to consider the key elements of these transformations in
the global North, and the role of (national and local) state institutions and policies in mediating them.

Allen J. Scott, The internal production space of the metropolis, in Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson
eds., The Blackwell City Reader, 2nd edition. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 2010, 49-59.
Richard Walker and Robert D. Lewis, Beyond the crabgrass frontier: industry and the spread of
North American cities, 1850-1950, Journal of Historical Geography, 27, 1, 2001, 3-19.
Robert Fishman, Megalopolis unbound in Philip Kasinitz ed., Metropolis. New York: NYU Press,
1995, 395-417.
Neil Smith, Gentrification, the frontier and the restructuring of urban space, in Susan Fainstein and
Scott Campbell eds., Readings in Urban Theory. 1st edition. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996, 338358.

Also recommended:

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Robert Fishman, Bourgeois utopias: visions of suburbia, in Susan Fainstein and Scott Campbell
eds., Readings in Urban Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996, 23-60.
Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005.

1 March

Review session and group planning work

During this session there will be an intensive review of the class so far. The remainder of the session will
be devoted to meetings with your Group collaborators, in consultation with your TFs, on your projects for
Part Four of the class.
Note: topics for paper #2 to be distributed today; due in class on 8 March.

(3) THE POLITICS OF SPACE: PLANNING AS A POLITICAL STRATEGY

There is a politics of space, Henri Lefebvre writes, because space is political. This part of the course
explores various dimensions of this enigmatic proposition, beginning on a relatively abstract,
epistemological level and then moving gradually towards the concrete level of institutional strategies
and political alliances designed to shape and reshape built environments at various spatial scales. We
also consider the role of popular struggles and protests, as well as everyday choreographies, in the
forging and transformation of urban built environments.

6 March

Knowledge, legibility, simplification

We open this inquiry by considering the ways in which the very effort to produce or reorganize urban
space entails distinctive forms of knowledge, particular ways of seeing and mapping the terrain to be
transformed, which in turn have massive implications for operations of transformative political strategies
on the ground. What does it mean to see like a state, and what are the implications of doing so for the
regulation of urban development? In what sense is urban space political? And how do maps
transform the site(s)urban or otherwisethey purport to represent?

James C. Scott, State simplifications: nature, space, people, The Journal of Political Philosophy, 3,
3, 1995, 191-233.
Dennis Cosgrove, Carto-city, in Geography & Vision: Seeing, Imagining and Representing the
World. London: Tauris, 2008, 169-182.

Also recommended:

Henri Lefebvre, Reflections on the politics of space, in Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden, Henri
Lefebvre: State, Space, World. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009, 167-184.

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8 March

National state spatial strategies

The process of urban developmentat all spatial scalesis powerfully shaped through national political
institutions, including those associated with the fields of urban, regional and territorial planning.
However, the role of state institutions and regulatory strategies in transforming the landscapes of
urbanization varies considerably across time and space. These readings offer some theoretical, historical
and applied perspectives on how and why national states intervene to organize and reorganize urban
spaces and, more generally, the territorial configuration of urban development. To what degree can the
geographies of urbanization be viewed as products of state spatial strategies?

John D. Ehrlichman, National growth policy, in John Friedmann and William Alonso eds., Regional
Policy: Readings in Theory and Application. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1975, 507-515.
Wilbur R. Thompson, The national system of cities as an object of public policy, in John Friedmann
and William Alonso eds., Regional Policy: Readings in Theory and Application. Cambridge, Mass.:
The MIT Press, 1975, 516-533.
Neil Brenner, Urban governance and the production of new state spaces in western Europe, 19602000, Review of International Political Economy, 11, 3, 2004, 447-488.

20 March

Week of March 12

Spring Break

Urban growth machines

How are decisions regarding the types and distribution of investments within and among cities made,
and what are their consequences for the urban built environment and social fabric? In this session we
consider work on urban growth machines, which offers powerful if controversial answers to these
questions. Logan and Molotch develop a political economy of investment in urban land-use systems that
also illuminates some of the localized political alliances that have historically underpinned urban
development processes. They also suggest that the institutional bias of planning towards growth has
any number of destructive and dysfunctional consequences for the social life of cities. Their work offers a
useful basis for analyzing and debating the institutional parameters within which planners, of whatever
political orientation, operate.

John Logan and Harvey Molotch, The city as a growth machine, in Susan Fainstein and Scott
Campbell eds., Readings in Urban Theory. 1st edition. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996, 291-337.

Also recommended:

Neil Brenner, Is there a politics of urban development? Reflections on the US case, in Richardson
Dilworth ed., The City in American Political Development. New York: Routledge, 2009, 121-140.

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John Mollenkopf, The Contested City. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983.

22 March

Urbanisms from below

Cities are shaped through the large-scale structural forces of capitalism, state power and migration, but
their built environments are also continually transformed through the everyday routines, strategies and
struggles of their inhabitants. This session considers various ways of approaching the role of everyday
lifeand popular contestationin the making and remaking of urban landscapes, both historically and
in the contemporary moment.

Jane Jacobs, "The uses of sidewalks," in Philip Kasinitz ed., Metropolis. New York: NYU Press, 1995,
111-129.
Paul Davidoff, Advocacy and pluralism in planning, in Eugenie Birch ed., The Urban and Regional
Planning Reader. New York: Routledge, 2009, 148-155.
James DeFilippis, Community control and development: the long view, in James DeFilippis and
Susan Saegert eds., The Community Development Reader. New York: Routledge, 2008, 28-35.
John Friedmann, The rise of civil society, in John Friedmann, Insurgencies: Essays in Planning
Theory. New York: Routledge, 2011, 109-125.

Also recommended:

Jane Jacobs, Downtown is for people, in Eugenie Birch ed., The Urban and Regional Planning
Reader. New York: Routledge, 2009, 124-131.
Lewis Mumford, Home remedies for urban cancer, in Donald L. Miller, The Lewis Mumford Reader.
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995, 184-200.
Herbert Gans, Urban vitality and the fallacy of physical determinism, in People and Plans. New
York: Basic Books, 1968, 25-33.
Deyan Sudjic, brief excerpt on Jane Jacobs from The hundred-mile city. New York: Flamingo, 1993,
20-25 .
Jeffrey Hou ed., Insurgent Public Space: Guerilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities.
New York: Routledge, 2010.
Jeffrey Hou and Michael Rios, Community-driven place-making: the social practice of participatory
design in the making of Union Point Park, Journal of Architectural Education, 2003, 19-27.
Simon Sadler, The Situationist City. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1999.
Tom McDonough ed., The Situationists and the City: An Anthology. New York: Verso, 2010.
Barbara Faga, The future of public participation, in Eugenie Birch ed., The Urban and Regional
Planning Reader. New York: Routledge, 2009, 265-271.
John F.C. Turner and Robert Fichter, Freedom to Build: Dweller Control of the Housing Process. New
York: Macmillan, 1972.
Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. New
York: Random House, 1967.

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Alan Altshuler, Community Control: The Black Demand for Participation in Large American Cities.
New York: Pegasus, 1970.

Note: topics for paper #3 to be distributed today; due in class on 29 March.

(4) (RE)SHAPING THE URBAN LANDSCAPE: VISIONS, EPISODES, EXPERIMENTS, STRUGGLES

In this final part of the course, we explore various key moments, strategies, episodes and
struggles during the history of urban, regional and territorial planning since the mid-19th
century. The following weeks will be organized in the form of Group Reports (45 min
presentations followed by 30 min discussions). Various readings are listed below as starting
points for the group projects, but each group must choose three core readings and provide
them to the class one week in advance of your session (coordination system to be arranged
with your TF and your TA).
In addition to its in-class presentation, each group will submit a jointly written dossier outlining
and documenting your arguments (approximately 20 pages of textit should also include any
relevant visual materials and a bibliography). Details of this assignment and the timeline for
your group work will be explained in class and discussed in depth in your sections.

27 March

Approaching the history of planning: frameworks for analysis

Todays class will be organized as a workshop in which we discuss strategies for the sessions ahead
and allocate time to groups to work together in class. This will be organized in part as a lecture, and
in part as a Q & A panel focused on the challenges your groups will be confronting in your research
and presentations.

Key questions around which Part Four of the course is organized:

Who are the agents/institutions of planning and intervention?

Who are their opponents and what barrierssocial, political, institutional, cultural, spatialstand in
the way?
What is their vision of the past, present and future urban fabric?
Does the impetus for intervention emerge from above, from below, or otherwise?
How does the plan / project / episode in question relate to formations of capitalism and state
power? To what extent does it include a role for public / democratic participation in the reshaping
of urban life?
How does the plan / project / episode envision the role of the inhabitants / users of urban space?

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If the plan / project was implemented, what were its consequences? If the plan was not
implemented, why not? In either case, what can we learn from the plans trajectory?
What relevance, if any, does the plan / project / episode in question have for the contemporary
urban condition, and ongoing efforts to shape the latter?

29 March

Group 1

Reconstructing the city (1)Haussmannization and the remaking of 19th century cities

Readings to be announced by Group 1

Recommended starting points for this topic:

David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Patrice Higonnet, Paris: Capital of the World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1982.

3 April

Group 2

Industrialization and the housing question

Readings to be announced by Group 2

Recommended starting points for this topic:

Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1845

[http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/].
Friedrich Engels, The Housing Question, 1872
[http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/housing-question/index.htm].
Eve Blau, The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919-1934. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.
Margaret Crawford, Building the Workingmans Paradise: The Design of American Company Towns.
New York: Verso, 1995.
Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America. Cambridge, Mass:
MIT Press, 1983.
Classic texts on the contemporary housing question by Peter Marcuse:
http://www.marcuse.org/peter/peter.htm

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5 April
Group 3
Urban planning, nature and utopia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries

Readings to be announced by Group 3

Recommended starting points for this topic:

Frederick Law Olmsted: Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns, 1870.
Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow, 1902.
Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution: An Introduction to the Town-Planning Movement and to the
Study of Civics, 1915.
Frank Lloyd Wright, Broadacre City: An Architects Vision, New York Times Magazine, 20 March
1932, 8-9.
Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography: Book Six: Broadacre City. Spring Green, WI: Taliesin, 1943.
Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Howard, Wright, Le Corbusier, 1977.
Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964.
Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.
Anne Whiston Spirn, The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design. New York: Basic Books,
1982.

10 April

Group 4

Reconstructing the city (II): high modernism and urban renewal

Readings to be announced by Group 4

Recommended starting points for this topic:

Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow and its Planning, trans. by Frederick Etchells. Dover: New York,
1987 [1929].
Congrs International dArchitecture Moderne, The Athens Charter, 1933. [see Le Corbusier, The
Athens Charter. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1973].
Jose Luis Sert, Can Our Cities Survive? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942.
Eric Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928-1960. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have
Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, 1974.
Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1982.
Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson, Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of
New York. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007.

16

Marshall Berman, "In the forest of symbols: some notes on modernism in New York," in Philip
Kasinitz ed., Metropolis, 130-163.
James Holston, The modernist city: an anthropological critique of Brasilia, in Gary Bridge and
Sophie Watson eds., The Blackwell City Reader. Second Edition. Oxford and Boston, 2010, 355-364.
Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Samuel Zipp, Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Christopher Klemek, The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal: Postwar Urbanism from New York
to Berlin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Robert Moses, Slums and city planning, The Atlantic Monthly, January 1945, 1-15.
Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Public Housing That Worked. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2008.
Katherine Bristol, The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, Journal of Architectural Education (1991).
Lawrence Vale, From the Puritans to the Projects. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.

12 April

Group 5

Postwar planning, suburbanization and state-financed decentralization

Readings to be announced by Group 5

Recommended starting points for this topic:

Ian McHarg, Design with Nature. Garden City, NY: Natural History Press, 1969.
Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1971
Kenneth T. Jackson. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1985.
Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000. New York:
Pantheon Books, 2003.
Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia. New York: Basic Books, 1987.
Robert Fogelson, Bourgeois Nightmares: Suburbia, 1870-1930. New Haven: Yale University Press,
2005.
Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African-American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Marc Weiss, The Rise of the Community Builders: The American Real Estate Industry and Urban Land
Planning, 1987.
Greg Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis, 1997.

17

17 April

Group 6

Planning on a very large scale: regions, territories, and beyond

Readings to be announced by Group 6

Recommended starting points for this topic:

Henri Lefebvre, The Survival of Capitalism: Reproduction of the Relations of Production. New York:
St. Martins Press, 1976.
John Friedmann and William Alonso, eds., Regional Development and Planning. Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1964.
John Friedmann, Territory and Function: The Evolution of Regional Planning. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1979.
Henri Lefebvre, The Survival of Capitalism: Reproduction of the Relations of Production. New York:
St. Martins Press, 1976.
Neil Brenner, New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2004.
Peter Hall and Kathy Pain, eds., The Polycentric Metropolis: Learning from Mega-City Regions in
Europe. London: Earthscan, 2006.
Other possible focal points: the European Spatial Development Plan (ESDP) and the planning of the
Pearl River Delta in South China.

19 April

Group 7

Neighborhoods, community action and the right to the city

Readings to be announced by Group 7

Recommended starting points for this topic:

Jane Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House, 1961.
Herbert J. Gans, The Urban Villagers. New York: Free Press, 1962.
Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. New
York: Random House, 1967.
Libero Andreotti and Xavier Costa, eds. Theory of the Drive and Other Situationist Writings on the
City. Barcelona: Museu dArt Contemporani de Barcelona, 1996.
Simon Sadler, The Situationist City. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998.

18

Henri Lefebvre, The Explosion: Marxism and the French Revolution. New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1969.
Alan Altshuler, Community Control: The Black Demand for Participation in Large American Cities.
New York: Pegasus, 1970.
John F.C. Turner and Robert Fichter, Freedom to Build: Dweller Control of the Housing Process. New
York: Macmillan, 1972.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984
[originally published in French in 1974].
The Whole Earth Catalog, 1969-71, 1974.
Harry C. Boyte, The Backyard Revolution. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981.
John Friedmann, Empowerment: The Politics of Alternative Development. Cambridge: Blackwell,
1992.
Mike Douglass and John Friedmann, eds., Cities for Citizens: Planning and the Rise of Civil Society in a
Global Age. New York: Wiley, 1998.
Brian Goldstein, Plannings End: Urban Renewal in New Haven, the Yale School of Art and
Architecture, and the Fall of the New Deal Spatial Order, Journal of Urban History 37, no. 3 (May
2011): 400-22.
Christopher Klemek, The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal: Postwar Urbanism from New York
to Berlin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
James DeFilippis and Susan Saegert eds., The Community Development Reader. New York:
Routledge, 2008
Tom Angotti, New York For Sale: Community Planning Confronts Global Real Estate. Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2008.
Jeffrey Hou, ed., Insugent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary
Cities. New York: Routledge, 2010.

Note: there may be room for constituting a Group 8 focusing on Austerity urbanism, i.e. the
reorientation of planning discourse and practice during the post-1980s period in conjunction with the
crisis of North Atlantic Fordism, accelerated global economic restructuring and the mobilization of
neoliberalized approaches to spatial policy and economic governance. This will be the topic of a future
GSD lecture course.

(5) PROSPECTS: POSSIBLE URBAN WORLDS

April

24

Concluding reflectionsand openings . . .

Review of our work and future directions.

Final readings to be determined.

Note: final group project reports due today.