This class is intended to introduce students to understandings
of the city generated from both social science literature and
the field of urban design. The first part of the course examines
literature on the history and theory of the city. Among other
factors, it pays special attention to the larger territorial
settings in which cities emerged and developed (ranging from the
global to the national to the regional context) and how these
affected the nature, character, and functioning of cities and
the lives of their inhabitants. The remaining weeks focus more
explicitly on the theory and practice of design visions for the
city, the latter in both utopian and realized form. One of our
aims will be to assess the conditions under which a variety of
design visions were conceived, and to assess them in terms of
the varying patterns of territorial "nestedness" (local,
regional, national, imperial, and global) examined in the first
part of the course. Another will be to encourage students to
think about the future pr