Affiliated Courses 2014 - 2024 | Princeton Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism & the Humanities

Below is the listing of courses taught by Initiative PIs, Fellows and Affiliated Faculty: the most recent semester courses appear first in the listing. Please use the links on the sidebar to jump to a specific semester.

SPRING 2024

URB 304 ENV 320 AMS 375 HUM 376 /The Politics of Land: Dispossession, Value, and Space / Instructor: Vanessa Koh

This class explores what land means for different groups of people-- as an asset, a risk management device, and an icon of cultural meaning. It asks what happens not just at "land's end" (in which land is stolen) but "people's end"-- in a global political economy where land is often worth more than its inhabitants? This course treats land as an orienting concept to trace processes of dispossession, commodification and financialization amid transformations in conceptions of space, material resources, and communities.

URB 305 SAS 351 AAS 364 ARC 325 / Race, Caste, and Space: Architectural History as Property History / Instructor: Sonali Dhanpal

This course is a cross-comparative spatial history of caste in South Asia and race in the United States. Exploring architecture's deep entanglement in property and capital, students will learn how modern property co-emerged with contextual assemblages of race, caste, class, ethnicity, gender, and citizenship. Taking a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to examine intertwined histories of settler colonial and colonial spatial practices in these different geographies, students will engage humanities research methods through critical reading and writing while simultaneously learning to analyze and draw from visual and material culture.

AMS 306 ARC 313 AAS 391 URB 311 / Commemoration, Crisis, and Revolution in the City / Instructor: Brian Whetstone

This course will explore the intersections between commemoration, heritage, social and political movements, and urban (re)evelopment. Through field trips to local institutions, museums, historic sites, and community groups planning for the upcoming Semiquincentennial, we will examine how Americans have mobilized the memory and meaning of Revolution to press for greater political rights, challenge commemorative projects, and launch revolutionary practices of memorialization. Students will develop a digital exhibition exploring past and present struggles to define the Revolution that have fueled the region's commemorative and urban landscapes.

ARC 314 ASA 313 HUM 374 URB 313 / Chinatown, The Japanese Garden, The Period Room: Case Studies for Diasporic Architecture / Instructor: Zhiyan Yang

This course delves into East Asian-styled architecture in the US through the lens of diaspora. By surveying Chinatowns, Japanese gardens, and period rooms via immersive field trips and the visual and textual documents, we examine how the experiences of immigration, racialization, and cultural exchange are reflected in the formal language, spatial interaction, cultural symbolism, and social dynamics of the built environment. Additionally, we interpret the process of representation, appropriation, modification, and ultimately, reinvention of architecture and space, all within the context of negotiation between the home and host land.

URB 392 ARC 392 HIS 381 AFS 392 / Building African Cities, Past and Present / Instructor: Gregory H. Valdespino

This course examines how Africans have made cities from the Medieval era to the present day. Students will learn about the forces that have structured the buildings found on African cityscapes, the jobs done by urban workers, and the relationship African urbanites had with their environments. Students will examine how people experienced and transformed urban landscapes across Africa and develop the skills needed to critically analyze urban built environments. By doing so, students will develop the tools to interpret how cities are made and remade as well as the ability to explain how cities have structured Africa's past, present and future.

HIS 202 URB 203 AMS 202 AAS 203 / The Sixties: Documentary, Youth, and the City / Instructors: Alison Isenberg, Purcell Carson

This seminar in history and documentary film explores personal narrative and how individual experience contributes to profound social change. We study 1960s youth through oral history, archival research, ethnography and journalism. Trenton NJ is the case study. Themes include: civil rights and Black power; immigration and migration; student uprisings and policing; education; gender and sexuality; churches and city institutions; sports; work, class and neighborhood; politics, law and government. Using documentary narrative, the course asks how a new generation of storytellers will shape public conversations and policy.

URB 384 AMS 386 HIS 340 ARC 387 / Affordable Housing in the United States / Instructor: Aaron Shkuda

This course introduces students to the ways that policy, design, and citizen activism shaped affordable housing in the United States from the early 20th century to the present. We explore privately-developed tenements and row houses, government-built housing, publicly-subsidized suburban homes and cooperatives, as well as housing developed through incentives and subsidies. Students will analyze the balance between public and private, free market and subsidy, and preservation and renewal. Close attention will be paid to the role of race in structuring the relationship between policymakers, property owners, renters, and homeowners.

ARC 492 URB 492 ENV 492 / Topics in the Formal Analysis of the Urban Structure: Environmental Challenges of Urban Sprawl / Instructor: Mario Gandelsonas

As part of the search for solutions to climate, water and energy challenges in a rapidly urbanizing world, it is crucial to understand and reassess the environmental challenges and potential of the exurban wasteland. This interdisciplinary course aims to add theoretical, pragmatic and cultural dimensions to scientific, technological, and policy aspects of current environmental challenges, in an effort to bridge the environmental sciences, urbanism and the humanities focusing on the transformation of the Meadowlands, the large ecosystem of wetlands, into a State Park.

URB 201 SPI 201 SOC 203 ARC 207 / Introduction to Urban Studies / Instructor: M. Christine Boyer

This course will examine different crises confronting cities in the 21st century. Topics will range from informal settlements, to immigration, terrorism, shrinking population, sprawl, rising seas, affordable housing, gentrification, smart cities. The range of cities will include Los Angles, New Orleans, Paris, Lagos, Caracas, Havana, New York, Hong Kong, Dubai among others.

SPA 227 EPS 227 URB 237 / Contemporary Issues in Spain / Instructor: Germán Labrador Méndez

An exploration of the major features of contemporary Spain from 1939 to the present with particular attention to developing an understanding the concepts of cultural identity and difference within the changing global context. The course will address the recent processes that have left a mark on the history of Spain: the fall of Francoism, the particular and controversial transition to democracy, the financial crisis of 2008, the Indignados social movement, the nationalist trends in Basque Country and Catalonia, and the latest feminist wave, among others. Discussions and frequent writing assignments.

ANT 228 URB 228 / Just Housing? Racial Capitalism and the Right to the City / Instructor: Jacob Geuder

This seminar explores racial capitalism and the right to the city from the perspective of the housing crisis in the US. We will engage historical studies, social theory, and urban ethnography in order to understand how redlining and real estate speculation produce landscapes of housing injustice. We will also consider the ways marginalized communities mobilize to fight insecurity and to guarantee their right to housing. In collaboration with our community partner, a social impact research and design studio, we will organize urban walking tours and interviews in Trenton, and students will produce collaborative multimedia projects.

MUS 264 URB 264 / Urban Blues and the Golden Age of Rock / Instructor: Rob C. Wegman

A survey of American popular music in the 1920s to 1960s. We will start with the early history of three major streams of music: Country & Western, Rhythm & Blues, and Popular music. The critical year in that history was 1954, when the streams fused into a volatile mixture that detonated with the birth of Rock 'n' Roll. From the beginning this was a story about race, politics, money, generational divides. The songs themselves will guide us on our path. And this course aims to guide our ears to a deeper understanding and appreciation of them.

HUM 352 ENG 252 URB 352 THR 360 / Arts in the Invisible City: Race, Policy, Performance / Instructor: D. Vance Smith

In this community-engaged class, students will be invited to learn about the dynamic history and role of the arts in Trenton through conversations with local artists and activists. Students will develop close listening skills with oral historian/artist Nyssa Chow. Readings include texts about urban invisibility, race, decoloniality, and public arts policy. Students will participate in the development of a virtual memorial and restorative project by Trenton artist Bentrice Jusu.

EGR 361 ENT 361 URB 361 AAS 348 / The Reclamation Studio: Humanistic Design applied to Systemic Bias / Instructor: Majora Carter

Assumptions and practices by the nonprofit industrial complex, government agencies and affordable housing developers treat poor communities, especially poor communities of color as problems to be managed by those from outside these communities. The Reclamation Studio explores the humanistic design practices applied by social entrepreneurs from low-status communities near Princeton (our "clients") that counteract that history of systemic bias with innovative development projects designed to retain the talent from within their communities. Students will have the opportunity to learn from, and contribute to their efforts.

ANT 363 AAS 369 URB 363 / Gangsters and Troublesome Populations / Instructor: Laurence Ralph

Since the 1920s, the term "gang" has been used to describe all kinds of collectives, from groups of well-dressed mobsters to petty criminals and juvenile delinquents. In nearly a century of research the only consistency in their characterization is as internal Other from the vantage of the law. This class will investigate how the category of "the gang" serves to provoke imaginaries of racial unrest and discourses of "dangerous," threatening subjects in urban enclaves. More broadly we will examine the methods and means by which liberal democratic governments maintain their sovereign integrity through the containment of threatening populations.

SOC 373 AMS 428 URB 373 / Systemic Racism: Myths and Realities / Instructor: Patricia Fernández-Kelly

This course focuses on the structural and institutional foundations of racial discrimination in the United States. It emphasizes the contributions of sociologists. The course gives a historical overview followed by an investigation of key legislative actions and economic factors inhibiting racial equality. Subsequent topics include migration and immigration; urban development; and residential segregation. The end of the course reviews resistance movements and policies aimed at addressing systemic racism, including restorative justice and reparations.

SPI 379 SOC 390 URB 379 / Global Urbanization / Instructor: Benjamin H. Bradlow

For the first time, most people now live in cities. One in seven humans lives in an urban slum. We analyze the political, economic, and social dynamics that both create and arise from urbanization, informality, and attempts to govern our contemporary urban world. We ask how formal and informal institutions change inequalities of shelter, work, race, and other social identities, across urban space. We investigate the links between the processes of urbanization and climate change, and how they shape the politics of cities. We draw from cases across the globe and the US, along with a range of social science methods and theoretical perspectives.

ARC 386 URB 386 AAS 383 / The Zoning of Things / Instructor: Mitch McEwen

This course introduces students to zoning as an urbanistic tool related to representation, classification, and design. Readings investigate zoning as a form of both ideation and technology through texts that include Keller Easterling, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Michel Foucault, Aristotle, and Samuel Delany, as well as the Zoning Resolution of the City of New York, films, video games, archival materials, and many forms of bureaucratic tables. Students will complete two texts that either analyze an existing zoning or propose a new zoning to operate on the built environment, socioeconomics, ecology, or other aspects of a specific site.

ART 466 ARC 466 URB 466 / Sicily: An Architectural History / Instructors: Basile C. Baudez, Sofia Hernandez

Despite its position at the center of the Mediterranean, Sicily has long been misunderstood. This seminar intends to provide a survey of the island's rich architectural history from Antiquity to present. Ravaged by volcanic eruptions, seismic activities, and droughts, Sicily has been forced to rebuild itself in the wake of devastation. Through close examination of building projects, visits to Firestone's Special Collections, and guest lecturers, the seminar seeks to provide a fresh look at a vibrant and diverse architectural center. To study the architecture of Sicily is to study architecture in and of the Mediterranean.

ARC 546 URB 546 / Technology and the City: The Architectural Implications of Networked Urban Landscape / Instructor: Andrew Laing

The seminar explores the implications of technologically networked cities for architectural programming and the design of spaces and places. Key issues examined: information technology reshaping the nature of architectural programming and our ideas of spaces, places and communities; programs for spaces, buildings, and the city being transformed by increasing mobility, fluidity and `blurring' of activities in space; and, the history of ideas that shape how we understand technology and urbanism, programming and architecture, including cyborg cities, sentient and smart cities, big data, hybrid places, crypto cities, and metaverse urbanism.

FALL 2023

ARC 205 URB 205 LAS 225 ENV 205 / Interdisciplinary Design Studio / Instructor: Mario Gandelsonas, Elliott Sturtevant

The course focuses on the social forces that shape design thinking. Its objective is to introduce architectural and urban design issues to build design and critical thinking skills from a multidisciplinary perspective. The studio is team-taught from faculty across disciplines to expose students to the multiple forces within which design operates.

SPI 390 URB 391 / Race, Ethnicity, Space & Place: Exclusion, Confinement & Transformation (RESPECT) / Instructor: Melissa Valle

How have racial and ethnic inequalities in housing and neighborhood development become hallmarks of many U.S. cities? This course focuses on the complex topics of race and racism from a spatial perspective, paying particular attention to the effects of interlocking systems of oppression on primarily urban African-American communities. However, we will not just examine the built environment of such communities. People shape and are shaped by the places they physically occupy. We, therefore, also delve into the narratives and everyday experiences of racialized city dwellers through the social sciences, the humanities, and media.

SPI 403 / Religion and Public Policy: At Home and Abroad / Instructor: Babak Manouchehrifar

Religion is a powerful force in public life, affecting how people think, act, and organize around the world. In this seminar, students will explore how religion shapes public policy in various contexts, both domestically and internationally. Students will examine how religious beliefs, values, and identities influence policy issues such as human rights, social justice, democracy, security, and development. Students will also analyze how policy makers engage with religious actors and institutions in different cultural and political settings. The seminar will expose students to a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to studying religion and public policy, as well as case studies from different regions of the world.

HIS 388 URB 388 AMS 380 AAS 388 / Unrest and Renewal in Urban America / Instructor: Alison Isenberg

This course surveys the history of cities in the United States from colonial settlement to the present. Over centuries, cities have symbolized democratic ideals of "melting pots" and cutting-edge innovation, as well as urban crises of disorder, decline, crime, and poverty. Urban life has concentrated extremes like rich and poor; racial and ethnic divides; philanthropy and greed; skyscrapers and parks; violence and hope; downtown and suburb. The course examines how cities in U.S. history have brokered revolution, transformation and renewal, focusing on class, race, gender, immigration, capitalism, and the built environment.

URB 300 ARC 300 HUM 300 AMS 300 / Urban Studies Research Seminar / Instructor: Aaron Shkuda

This seminar introduces urban studies research methods through a study of New York in conversation with other cities. Focused on communities and landmarks represented in historical accounts, literary works, art and film, we will travel through cityscapes as cultural and mythological spaces - from the past to the present day. We will examine how standards of evidence shape what is knowable about cities and urban life, what "counts" as knowledge in urban studies, and how these different disciplinary perspectives construct and limit knowledge about cities as a result.

URB 385 SOC 385 HUM 385 ARC 385 / Mapping Gentrification / Instructor: Aaron Shkuda

This seminar introduces the study of gentrification, with a focus on mapping projects using GIS (Geographic Information Systems) software. Readings, films, and site visits will situate the topic, as the course examines how racial landscapes of gentrification, culture and politics have been influenced by and helped drive urban change. Tutorials in ArcGIS will allow students to convert observations of urban life into fresh data and work with existing datasets. Learn to read maps critically, undertake multifaceted spatial analysis, and master new cartographic practices associated with emerging scholarship in the Digital and Urban Humanities.

CEE 471 GEO 471 URB 471 / Introduction to Water Pollution Technology / Instructor: Peter Jaffe

An introduction to the science of water quality management and pollution control in natural systems; fundamentals of biological and chemical transformations in natural waters; identification of sources of pollution; water and wastewater treatment methods; fundamentals of water quality modeling.

EGR 361 ENT 361 URB 361 AAS 348 / The Reclamation Studio: Humanistic Design applied to Systemic Bias / Instructor: Majora Carter

FRE 217 ECS 327 COM 258 URB 258 / Revisiting Paris / Instructor: André Benhaïm

Beyond the myth of the City of Light, this course proposes to look at the real "lives" of Paris. Focusing on the modern and contemporary period, we will study Paris as an urban space, an object of representation, and part of French cultural identity. To do so, we will use an interdisciplinary approach, through literature, history, sociology, art history, architecture, etc. And to deepen our understanding of its history and its making, we will take a mandatory trip to Paris. During Fall Break (Oct. 14-22), students will not only (re)visit the city, but also meet guest speakers and conduct personal projects they will have designed in Princeton.

SPRING 2023

URB 339 HUM 339 REL 398 / Religion and the City / Instructor: Babak Manouchehrifar

This course introduces students to the socio-historical and political processes through which religion is represented, contested, and managed in the built environment. The course pays particular attention to the way that claims of religion implicate questions of diversity, difference, and justice in contemporary cities. Students will study the conceptual and historical debates on the role and place of religion in the public sphere and analyze empirical cases of how spatial decisions regulate or enable expressions of religious difference in urban settings.

URB 356 LAS 313 / Landscape, Ecology, and Place / Instructor: Mary Pena

This course considers theories and practices of reinterpreting landscape through the lenses of indigeneity, transnational feminism, and decoloniality. We will explore alternative ways of knowing and relating to places--thinking across space and time, built structures and material absences, borders and networks of relation--with a focus on the Americas. Discussions will engage spatial perspectives in geography, anthropology, and decolonial thought along with creative writing and multimedia work. Students will apply critical spatial practices by designing a digital project using textual, sonic, and visual modes to remap a selected site.

URB 360 / Trees, Toxics & Transitions: Urban Ecological Design and the Second World / Instructor: Maria Taylor

This interdisciplinary course explores the history of city-nature relations, centering the intersection of industrialization, environmentalism and modernization known as urban greening. Particular emphasis is placed on urban greening outside Western traditions of capitalist urbanism. We will apply a framework of critical and comparative analysis to the question of how urbanists' visions for socialist urban landscapes have responded to community and environmental health hazards in the long 20th century. What lessons and warnings for present climate justice and mitigation efforts in urbanism can be taken from their attempts?

URB 382 ARC 382 / Unlikely Architects in Plantation Landscapes / Instructor: Will Davis

This seminar explores architecture in out-of-the-way places through the perspectives of an unlikely set of historical actors: counterinsurgency experts, guerrilla fighters, Indigenous resistance groups, government officials, religious activists. Thinking from the intellectual traditions of the global South, the course explores the ways in which architecture was employed as a narrative device in twentieth century environmentalist movements.

URB 390 ARC 390 / African Urban History / Instructor: Gregory Valdespino

This course examines how cities, and city-dwellers, across Africa have changed over the past 500 years. We consider how local, regional, and global forces have structured African cityscapes, jobs done by urban workers, and the relationship African urbanites had with changing environments. By doing so, students develop the tools to analyze urban spaces and explain the different ways cities have structured Africa's past, present and future. Students will examine how people experienced, built, and transformed urban landscapes across Africa and unpack the social, economic, political, and spatial structures that have structured African cities.

SPI 404 / U.S. Cities: New Policy for Old Places, SPIA Junior Policy Research Seminar / Instructor: Alison Isenberg

Students will take up the challenge of generating new ideas in contemporary urban policy, with the goal of shaping equitable, dynamic cities. What are the opportunities and limitations of using cities as a category of policy analysis? What are the opportunities and limitations of using policy to transform cities? Should top-down policy frameworks be reworked to include more community agency? U.S. culture favors new frontiers, but most cities are old places looking to reinvent themselves. Every city’s inherited historical patterns have channeled policy—land-use, legal structures, demographic trends, deindustrialization, past mayors, master plans, racial segregation, disasters, etc. Policy frameworks themselves of course have histories. Understanding the recent urban past sheds light on where cities might go next; it helps identify bold new directions as well as fresh combinations of existing strategies.

URB 310 DAN 310 HUM 344 THR 323 / The Arts of Urban Transition / Instructors: Aaron Shkuda, Aaron Landsman

This course uses texts and methods from history, theatre, performance studies, and dance to examine artists and works of art as agents of change in New York (1960-present) and contemporary "Rust Belt" cities. Issues addressed include relationships between artists, changing urban economies, and the built environment; the role of the artist in gentrification and creative placemaking; the importance of local history in art interventions; and assessing impacts of arts initiatives. A Spring break trip, and visits to key local sites, are included. Students will use data and methods from the course to produce final projects.

URB 481 SPI 481 SOC 481 / Special Topics in Institutions and Networks: Global Urban Political Economy / Instructor: Benjamin Bradlow

For the first time, most people now live in cities. One in seven humans lives in an urban slum. We analyze the political, economic, and social dynamics that both create and arise from urbanization, informality, and attempts to govern our contemporary urban world. We ask how formal and informal institutions change inequalities of shelter, work, race, and other social identities, across urban space. We investigate the links between the processes of urbanization and climate change, and how they shape the politics of cities. We draw from cases across the globe, along with a range of social science methods and theoretical perspectives.

URB 201 SPI 201 SOC 203 ARC 207 / Introduction to Urban Studies / Instructor: M. Christine Boyer

This course will examine different crises confronting cities in the 21st century. Topics will range from informal settlements, to immigration, terrorism, shrinking population, sprawl, rising seas, affordable housing, gentrification, smart cities. The range of cities will include Los Angles, New Orleans, Paris, Logos, Caracas, Havana, New York, Hong Kong, Dubai among others.

URB 202 JRN 202 LAO 232 / Documentary Film and the City / Instructor: Purcell Carson

In this hands-on seminar in non-fiction film, we work at the intersection of investigation and portraiture to explore how Central American migration has shaped two small cities: Trenton NJ and Salcajá, Guatemala. Our tool of inquiry is documentary film, which brings students in direct contact with intimate stories of real lives. Readings, screenings, and discussions focus on the topics of migration, reverse migration, remittances, and immigration policy, as well as the ethics and craft of film. Students will collaborate--with each other, subjects, and filmmakers in Guatemala--to produce and edit stories told from both sides of the border.

URB 224 ANT 223 AMS 223 AAS 224 / Policing and Militarization Today / Instructors: Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús and Laurence Ralph

This class aims to explore transnational issues in policing. Drawing heavily upon anthropological methods and theory, we aim neither to vindicate nor contest the police's right to use force (whether a particular instance was a violation of law), but instead, to contribute to the understanding of force (its forms, justifications, interpretations). The innovative transnational approach to policing developed during the semester will allow for a cross-cultural comparative analysis that explores larger rubrics of policing in a comprehensive social scientific framework.

URB 237 SPA 227 EPS 227 / Contemporary Issues in Spain / Instructor: Natalia Castro Picón

URB 262B CEE 262B ARC 262B EGR 262B / Structures and the Urban Environment / Instructor: Maria E. Garlock

Known as "Bridges", this course focuses on structural engineering as a new art form begun during the Industrial Revolution and flourishing today in long-span bridges, thin shell concrete vaults, and tall buildings. Through laboratory experiments students study the scientific basis for structural performance and thereby connect external forms to the internal forces in the major works of structural engineers. Illustrations are taken from various cities and countries thus demonstrating the influence of culture on our built environment.

URB 418 HIS 418 / Imagined Cities / Instructor: Gyan Prakash

An undergraduate seminar about the urban experiences and representations of the modern city as society. Beginning with the premise that the "soft city" of ideas, myths, symbols, images, and psychic expressions is as important as the "hard city" of bricks and mortar, this course explores the experiences and imaginations of modern cities in different historical contexts. Among the cities we will examine are Manchester, London, Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Algiers, Bombay, and Hong Kong. The course will use a variety of materials, but will focus particularly on cinema to examine different imaginative expressions of the urban experience.

URB 546 ARC 546 / Technology and the City: The Architectural Implications of Networked Urban Landscape / Instructor: Andrew Laing

FALL 2022

ARC 205 URB 205 LAS 225 ENV 205 / Interdisciplinary Design Studio / Instructors: Mario Gandelsonas, Ana Ozaki

JRN 280 / The Literature of Fact: The World and the City / Instructor: Kushanava Choudhury

For the first time, more humans today live in cities than in villages worldwide. This course explores urban life and the social and cultural dimensions of global migration to cities through the craft of narrative nonfiction. Students will read works from all over the world, and in languages other than English, that combine reportage, social science, history and memoir. They will explore the structures of texts; learn to do interviews, use archives and write field notes; and produce long-form narratives. The seminar will include opportunities for reporting from the field, particularly in immigrant and refugee neighborhoods in nearby cities.

URB 300 ARC 300 HUM 300 AMS 300 / Urban Studies Research Seminar / Instructor: Aaron Shkuda

HUM 340 MTD 340 AMS 440 SOC 376 / Musical Theatre and Fan Cultures / Instructors: Elizabeth M. Armstrong, Stacy E. Wolf

Why do people love Broadway musicals? How do audiences engage with musicals and their stars? How have fan practices changed since the 1950s alongside economic and artistic changes in New York and on Broadway? In what ways does "fan of" constitute a social identity? How do fans perform their devotion to a show, to particular performers, and to each other? This class examines the social forms co-created by performers and audiences, both during a performance and in the wider culture. Students will practice research methods including archival research, ethnographic observation, in-depth interviewing, and textual and performance analysis.

ENV 347 / Field Seminar in Regional Environmental Politics / Instructors: Nathan Jessee, Jerry C. Zee

Field Seminar in Regional Environmental Politics will provide students the opportunity for experiential learning and regional engagement with a range of important environmental topics by pairing intensive topical readings from the environmental social sciences, humanities, and sciences with field-based pedagogy. ENV 347 will proceed in three thematic modules, each of which will be anchored by a field trip to a relevant site in the region (Eg. New Jersey, Philadelphia, and New York City). The intensive seminar enhances ENV's goals of broad-based, interdisciplinary approach to environmental topics through locally engaged research and practice.

URB 385 SOC 385 HUM 385 ARC 385 / Mapping Gentrification / Instructor: Aaron Shkuda

HIS 388 URB 388 AMS 380 AAS 388 / Unrest and Renewal in Urban America / Instructor: Alison E. Isenberg

CEE 474 / Special Topics in Civil and Environmental Engineering: The Climatological, Hydrological & Environmental Footprints of Cities / Instructor: Elie Bou-Zeid

This course examines how cities modify their environment, with a focus on the grand urban challenges of the 21st century related to climate, water, and pollution. It starts with an introduction to the challenge of urbanization and how the population and size of cities can be quantified and modeled. We then examine heat, air and water flow in cities, focusing on how they induce urban heat islands, exacerbate floods, modify power consumption, and reduce thermal comfort. We conclude the course with an examination of how buildings and cities can be designed to be more sustainable and sensitive to their climate.

ARC 526 / Research in Urbanism: The Geographies of Environmental Justice / Instructor: M. Christine Boyer

This course studies uneven geographies of environmental justice across scales: outer space, the earth, nation, city and neighborhood. It examines the production of sacrifice zones of geo-engineering projects, petrochemical landscapes, material resource extraction, toxic waste disposal, containment of ungovernable bodies, and unjust real estate practices. How can architects and landscape architects address the territorializing zones of entangled matter and bodies? How can they move beyond exposing injustices and oppressive structures to a new level of creative ecologies of justice and equity?

SPRING 2022

SAS 355 ANT 395 ENV 381 URB 355 / Coastal Justice: Ecologies, Societies, Infrastructures in South Asia / Instructor: Chandana Anusha

This seminar will consider the modern South Asian coastline to understand the past, present, future of coasts in an era of climate change. Historical maritime trade routes, massive development projects, and rising influence of environmental change all shape the South Asian coast as a new frontier of resource control. Students will explore the cultural political desires and discontents that become entangled in coastlines, search for alternative imaginations of life that people mark out on the coastline. In doing so, we move towards an environmental justice perspective of the South Asian coastline.

CEE 392 HUM 392 / Engineering Justice and the City: Technologies, Environments, and Power / Instructor: Dean Chahim

This course is an opportunity to reimagine engineering as a liberatory and collective practice that challenges systems of domination, inequality and environmental exploitation in cities. Interdisciplinary readings and films on topics ranging from urban water systems to algorithmic policing will examine how social and environmental injustices in cities have been produced or reinforced through engineering designs while also exploring new frameworks for designing just cities. Students will put these frameworks into practice by participating in a conceptual design studio, focused on the radical redesign of urban infrastructures and technologies.

AMS 312 GSS 462 URB 316 ENV 314 / Race, Gender, and the Urban Environment / Instructor: Davy Knittle

This course considers how environmental racism shapes urban inequality. We will discuss how racial and gender bias have conditioned proposals for the future of cities and the planet. We will also address how people who have experienced racial and gender marginalization have formed relationships with land, water, and non-human life in response to crisis. We will address environmentalist work in geography, critical race studies, city planning, queer and trans theory, and disability studies along with novels, journalism, and film to analyze how ideas of race and gender and questions of urban and planetary futures have informed one another.

HIS 202 URB 203 AMS 202 AAS 203 / The Sixties: Documentary, Youth and the City / Instructors: Alison Isenberg, Purcell Carson

This seminar in history and documentary film explores personal narrative and how individual experience contributes to profound social change. We study 1960s youth through oral history, biography, memoir, ethnography and journalism. Trenton NJ is the case study. Themes include: civil rights & Black power; immigration & migration; student uprisings & policing; gender & sexuality; high school & college; churches & city institutions; sports & youth culture; labor, class & neighborhood; politics & government. Working with documentary narrative, the course asks how a new generation of storytellers will shape public conversations and policy.

SPI 531 / Identity, Power, and Policy / Instructor: Devanne E. Brookins

This course provides an overview of how identity and power inform public policy in the U.S. and across the globe. Among the topics examined are: immigration and identity dynamics across the globe; identity, psychology, and public policy; questions of race, ethnicity, and group identity in residential segregation; the intersections of identity concerns with drug policies, policing, and sentencing; identity and economic development in Africa and the U.S.; policymaking and Islamic identity; and the ever-evolving identity politics in the U.S. as they inform media, elections, and policymaking.

SPI 540 / Urbanization and Development / Instructor: Devanne E. Brookins

This course examines the histories, processes and nuanced dynamics that contribute to the making of cities in the Global South. We explore central debates in the study of these cities across geography, urban studies and planning, and development studies. Students deepen their understanding of the Global South, how it is conceptualized and what this means for urban development, while identifying patterns and specificities across the comparative contexts of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Ultimately, we consider how these actors are, or should be considered, in policymaking and planning interventions in the Global South.

SPI 404 / Policy Research Seminar: Housing as Infrastructure: A Social Policy Framework / Instructor: Shoshana Goldstein

This junior policy research seminar for SPIA majors will be of particular relevance to students interested in pursuing research questions on urban policy, broadly conceived, or those interested in investigating topics related to the history of public and affordable housing policy in the US, internationally, or with a Global South/International Development perspective. Over the past year, a national conversation has emerged about whether, as HUD Director Marcia Fudge put it "Housing is infrastructure.” Infrastructure is generally thought of as a public good--a system or technology of the built environment that invisibly guides the flow of resources, and supports social welfare. This policy research seminar asks: what does a conceptualization of “Housing as infrastructure” offer policymakers, planners, activists, and members of the public? Specifically, this seminar explores the origins and major debates in housing as a form of social infrastructure, looking at its legacies as a public good, a private asset to be regulated for specific outcomes, and as a human right.

ARC 492 URB 492 ENV 492 / Topics in the Formal Analysis of the Urban Structure: Environmental Challenges of Urban Sprawl / Instructor: Mario Gandelsonas

HIS 584 / Topics in Urban History: City, Region, Nation, Place / Instructor: Alison Isenberg

As Intensive readings course surveying rich recent scholarship on history of cities and their regions, intersecting with disciplines such as geography, sociology, political science, art history, built environment, planning, policy, architecture, and public humanities -- as well as with historical fields of research in race, ethnicity, gender, class, capitalism, business, and culture. The seminar covers the field's evolution from 1960s to recent multidisciplinary, comparative, national, and transnational studies, addressing problems of place, social processes, human experience, methods, and archives.

ARC 303 URB 303 EGR 303 / Wall Street and Silicon Valley: Place in the American Economy / Instructor: Aaron Shkuda

This course examines two places that play an outsized role in the American economy: Wall Street and Silicon Valley. They are distinct and similarly enduring locations. They embody a divide between urban and suburban, East Coast and West Coast, skyscrapers and office parks, tradition and innovation, conservative and liberal. What makes these places endure? How do their histories, architecture, economic dynamics, and distinct cultures shape them as places? Particular attention will be paid to the changes to white collar work and the challenges to the importance of place caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

FALL 2021

ARC 205 URB 205 LAS 225 ENV 205 / Interdisciplinary Design Studio / Instructors: Mario Gandelsonas, Chukwuemeka V. Chukwuemeka

URB 378 ARC 344 SAS 378 HUM 378 / South Asian Migrations / Instructor: Shoshana Goldstein

This interdisciplinary course explores the history, politics, and social dynamics of urban migration on the Indian subcontinent, home to and source of some of the largest migrations in human history. Through writing, discussion, and other activities, the class will also encounter broader concepts in the study of migration; its diversity, causes, challenges, as well as implications for social organization and city planning. Subtopics include the history of Asia's great migrations, partition and refugee resettlement, indentured and imported labor, gender politics, South Asian diasporas in the US, and the rural-urban divide in the global South.

ENV 345 URB 345 ARC 345 LAS 395 / Thinking Through Soil / Instructor: Seth Denizen

Soil is a critical resource for an increasingly urbanized planet. In this course our goal will be to familiarize ourselves with the fundamentals of soil science and soil theory in order to consider the relationship between soils and the urban environment. Through engagements with both humanistic and empirical scholarship we will develop a perspectival approach to tracing the diverse political and disciplinary contexts in which soil is made an object of knowledge. In particular, the course will feature an extended case study of Mexico City's wastewater agriculture system, and the colonial history of indigenous Latin American soil knowledge.

HIS 388 URB 388 AMS 380 AAS 388 / Unrest and Renewal in Urban America / Instructor: Alison Isenberg

URB 300 ARC 300 HUM 300 AMS 300 / Urban Studies Research Seminar / Instructor: Aaron Shkuda

URB 385 ARC 385 SOC 385 HUM 385 / Mapping Gentrification / Instructor: Aaron Shkuda

This seminar introduces the study of gentrification, with a focus on mapping projects using GIS (Geographic Information Systems) software. Readings, films, and site visits situate the topic, as the course examines how racial landscapes of gentrification, culture and politics have been influenced by and helped drive urban change. Tutorials in ArcGIS allow students to convert observations of urban life into fresh data and work with existing datasets. Students learn to read maps critically, undertake multifaceted spatial analysis, and master new cartographic practices associated with emerging scholarship in the Digital and Urban Humanities.

SPRING 2021

AFS 450 / Making Home in African Cities: History of Housing, 1800 to the Present / Instructor: Halimat Somotan

One of the basic human needs is housing, yet access to shelter is not a universal right. What does it mean to create a home? How have state policies shaped the residential choices of long-term settlers and newcomers in Africa? This seminar invites students to explore the struggles for housing in African cities from the nineteenth century to the contemporary period. Students will analyze primary and secondary texts (such as films and novels) on the evolution of access to housing in cities, and learn about the impact of colonial and post-independent public health, urban planning, and labor policies on how migrant workers find and secure housing in cities. The course will focus on specific case studies, including family compounds in Lagos and the Soweto townships of Johannesburg.

ARC 580 HUM 580/ Living Room: Gender, Difference, and Dissent / Instructor: Sophie Hochhäusl

This seminar engages students in an analysis of architectural and urban writing through the lens of queer, feminist, and trans theory focusing on networks of people in the production of space who have organized around issues of gender. The course takes the poetry of American-Caribbean professor, writer, and activist June Jordan as its point of departure, arguing that her concept of “living room” theorizes true places for encounter that provide safe spaces to probe writing and speaking against the imposition of others. A focus on bibliographies (and autobiographies), as well as individual and collective writing assignments, will allow student to approach and reflect on a body of scholarly work while writing from their own identity.

URB 378 ARC 344 SAS 378 HUM 378 / South Asian Migrations in Global Context / Instructor: Shoshana Goldstein

This course will engage students in the study of South Asian urban migration, including its diverse forms, causes, challenges, as well its cultural, political, economic, and spatial implications for social organization and city planning. Students will investigate international migration and the South Asian diaspora, as well as internal migration, including the challenges of achieving local citizenship for the working poor in cities, and the ongoing divide between rural and urban places as sending and receiving locations in South Asia and the Global South more broadly. Students will learn about the experiences of Bangladeshi migrant workers in Dubai, South Asian diasporas in New York, Toronto, suburban New Jersey, London, Cape Town, Delhi, Karachi and Mumbai, as well as in other cities and regions.

ARC 205 URB 205 LAS 225 ENV 205 / Interdisciplinary Design Studio / Instructor: Elise Silva

ARC 303 URB 303 EGR 303 / Wall Street and Silicon Valley: Place in the American Economy / Instructor: Aaron Shkuda

SPI 540 / Urbanization and Development / Instructor: Devanne Brookins

ARC 492 URB 492 ENV 492 / Topics in the Formal Analysis of the Urban Structure: Environmental Challenges of Urban Sprawl / Instructor: Mario Gandelsonas

Additional Urban Cross-listed Courses:

ANT 223 / AMS 223 / AAS 224 / URB 224 / Policing and Militarization Today / Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús and Laurence Ralph

ANT 227 / URB 225 / Urban Anthropology / Mark Drury

ARC 546 / URB 546 / Technology and the City: The architectural implications of networked urban landscape / Andrew Laing

HIS 418 / URB 418 / Imagined Cities / Gyan Prakash

HUM 352 / ENG 252 / URB 352 / THR 350 / Arts in the Invisible City: Race, Policy, Performance / Nathan Davis and Donald Vance-Smith

JRN 449 / HLS 448 / URB 447J / International News: Reporting on Rising Nationalism in Europe / Joanna Kakissis

LAS 217 / POL 271 / URB 217 / ANT 397 / Culture, Politics, and Human Rights in Latin America / Marian Thorpe

SOC 210 / LAS 210 / URB 210 / LAO 210 / Urban Sociology: The City and Social Change in the Americas / Patricia Fernández-Kelly

URB 201 / SPI 201 / SOC 203 / ARC 207 / Introduction to Urban Studies / M. Christine Boyer

URB 202 / JRN 202 / LAO 232 / Documentary Film and the City / Purcell Carson

AAS 350 / SOC 362 / Rats, Riots, and Revolution: Housing in the Metropolitan United States / Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

FALL 2020

URB 205 / ARC 205 / LAS 225 / ENV 205 / Interdisciplinary Design Studio / Instructor: Mario Gandelsonas, Adrián Lerner Patrón

URB 300 / ARC 300 / HUM 300 / SLA 300 / Urban Studies Research Seminar / Instructor: Aaron Shkuda

URB 385 SOC 385 HUM 385 ARC 385 / Mapping Gentrification / Instructor: Aaron Shkuda

WWS 401 / Climate Adaptation and the Coasts / Instructor: Guy Nordenson

This policy task force will examine the current practice of adaption in places that have been impacted by coastal storms and tsunamis, to understand the state of practice and future planning including climate change. These will include the US coasts as well as the East coast of Japan. We will examine historical examples (Tohoku, Japan and Naples, Italy) of coastal adaptation to look for fresh ideas for the future. Task force members will be asked to explore alternative policies and planning strategies that may well break with current practices in an effort to think creatively about a very difficult challenge. The findings and policy recommendations will be shared with public sector policymakers, researchers and policy analysts, and advocates working on behalf of coastal communities.

AMS 317 MTD 321 THR 322 ENG 249 / Sondheim's Musicals and the Making of America / Instructor: Stacy Wolf

In this course, we'll examine the musicals of Stephen Sondheim from COMPANY (1970) to ROAD SHOW (2009) as a lens onto America. How have Sondheim's musicals conversed with American history and American society since the mid-20th century? How do Sondheim's musicals represent America and Americans, and how have various productions shaped and re-shaped those representations? We'll explore how Sondheim and his collaborators used the mainstream, popular, and commercial form of musical theater to challenge, critique, deconstruct, and possibly reinforce some of America's most enduring myths.

DAN 215 ANT 355 GSS 215 AMS 215 / Introduction to Dance Across Cultures/ Instructor: Judith Hamera

Bharatanatyam, butoh, hip hop, and salsa are some of the dances that will have us travel from temples and courtyards to clubs, streets, and stages around the world. Through studio sessions, readings and viewings, field research, and discussions, this seminar will introduce students to dance across cultures with special attention to issues of migration, cultural appropriation, gender and sexuality, and spiritual and religious expression. Students will also learn basic elements of participant observation research. Guest artists will teach different dance forms. No prior dance experience is necessary.

URB 377 ENV 377 CEE 377 SAS 377 / Sustainable Cities in the US and India: Technology, Policy & Entrepreneurship Pathways / Instructor: Anu Ramaswami

An interdisciplinary exploration of our quest for urban sustainability in different parts of the world. We will: 1) Explore the concept of sustainable cities, focusing on systems that provide food, energy, water, mobility, housing, waste management, and public spaces to more than half the world's people that live in urban areas today; 2) Compare and contrast cities in the US and India, understanding their diverse contexts and current baseline in terms of infrastructure, environment, economy, health, wellbeing and equity. 3) Explore pathways to a more sustainable future, including technology innovation, policy and social entrepreneurship.

URB 401 ARC 401 / Theories of Housing and Urbanism / Instructor: Andrew Laing

The seminar will explore theories of urbanism and housing by reading canonical writers who have created distinctive and influential ideas about urbanism and housing from the nineteenth century to the present. The writers are architects, planners, and social scientists. The theories are interdisciplinary. One or two major works will be discussed each week. We will critically evaluate their relevance and significance for architecture now. Topics include: modernism, technological futurism, density, the new urbanism, the networked city, landscape urbanism, and sustainable urbanism.

WWS 331 SOC 312 AAS 317 / Race and Public Policy / Instructor: Douglas Massey

This course analyzes the historical construction of race as a concept in American society, how and why this concept was institutionalized publicly and privately in various arenas of U.S. public life at different historical junctures, and the progress that has been made in dismantling racialized institutions since the civil rights era.

WWS 328 / Crime and Violence in U.S. Cities / Instructor: Patrick Sharkey

This course focuses on the problems of crime and violence in the United States, and considers how to confront these problems. The semester is organized into four parts: 1) How to think about and study the problems of crime and violence; 2) Ideas and theories explaining crime and violence; 3) The challenge of violence in the United States; and 4) Approaches to confronting violence. Over the course of the semester, students will carry out two research projects analyzing data and policy related to crime and violence.

ARC 519 / Climate Change, Adaptation and Urban Design / Instructor: Guy Nordenson

Climate change adaptation is a pressing and difficult challenge to urban design, ecological and engineering planning theory and practice. It is clear that architects, planners, engineers and designers have an important role to help cities contend with climate adaptation. This seminar reviews the general state of science and practice of climate change and adaptation with a primary focus on the United States. It looks to the work of Frederick Law Olmsted for some of the theoretical basis of developing an approach to climate adaptation that is democratic and progressive and evaluate the impediments which restrict change.

WWS 537 SOC 537 / Urban Inequality and Social Policy / Instructor: Patrick Sharkey

This course focuses on the causes, consequences, and responses to urban inequality. The course is organized in four parts. First, we consider how one comes to learn about and understand cities and neighborhoods. Second, we review classic and current ideas about how urbanization affects the way we live and interact with each other. Third, we assess various explanations for urban inequality. Fourth, we focus our attention on central problems and challenges of urban life, from segregation to violence, and consider policy responses.

SPRING 2020

ARC 205 URB 205 LAS 225 ENV 205 / Interdisciplinary Design Studio / Instructor: Elise Silva

ARC 303 URB 303 EGR 303 / Wall Street and Silicon Valley: Place in the American Economy / Instructor: Aaron Shkuda

This course examines two places that play an outsized role in the American economy: Wall Street and Silicon Valley. They are distinct and similarly enduring locations. They embody a divide between urban and suburban, East Coast and West Coast, skyscrapers and office parks, tradition and innovation, conservative and liberal. Despite the ubiquity of electronic trading, firms still congregate in Lower Manhattan. Tech workers fight traffic to maintain a presence in Mountain View. What makes these places endure? How do their histories, architecture, economic dynamics, and distinct cultures shape them as places?

AMS 322 URB 322 ARC 326 / The Architecture of Race / Instructor: Ashlie Sandoval

This seminar explores the varied ways American architecture and design have lent themselves to processes of racialization, from embodied experiences of race within the built environment to racialized representations of architecture. How might the built environment change how we perceive, understand, and experience race? How does architecture not only reflect race but constitute a way of seeing and feeling race? To expand our understanding of architecture's relationship to race, our approach will be interdisciplinary, including readings from fields such as but not limited to urban studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, and performance studies.

ARC 396 / Comparing the Urban in the Americas and South Asia / Instructor: Priti Narayan

This course bridges the gap between pedagogy on Western cities, and that on cities of the so-called Global South, to compare urbanization and social movements across the Americas and South Asia. Specific course units will examine the development of informal settlements, urban segregation, enclave urbanism, privatization of public spaces, evictions, gentrification, homelessness, and the criminalization of the urban poor. Attention will also be paid to social movements focused on the right to the city. It asks how these processes and phenomena are similar, different, and / or interconnected across contexts.

ARC 524 / Making Legible: Environmental Sensing and the Politics of Measurement / Instructor: Dietmar Offenhuber

This interdisciplinary seminar is an experimental course that aims to develop a framework for the production, use, and critique of environmental data. While data collection is often considered a merely bureaucratic exercise that is at best the basis of higher-level discourse, this course emphasizes the sensory, material, and participatory aspects of environmental data production. Through experiment and analysis, we seek to develop modes of critical thinking about data that emerge from a material engagement with physical traces and the data collection process.

WWS 540 / Urbanization and Development / Instructor: Devanne Brookins

Examines the histories, processes and nuanced dynamics that contribute to the making of cities in the Global South. We explore central debates in the study of these cities across geography, urban studies and planning, and development studies. Students deepen their understanding of the Global South, how it is conceptualized and what this means for urban development, while identifying patterns and specificities across the comparative contexts of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Ultimately, we consider how these complex factors are, or should be considered, in policymaking and planning interventions in cities of the Global South.

HIS 584 / Topics in Urban History: City, Region, Nation, Place / Instructor: Alison Isenberg

Intensive readings course surveying rich recent scholarship on history of cities and their regions, intersecting with disciplines such as geography, sociology, political science, art history, built environment, planning, policy, architecture, and public humanities-as well as with historical fields of research in race, ethnicity, gender, class, capitalism, business, and culture. Seminar covers field's evolution from 1960s to recent multidisciplinary, comparative, national, and transnational studies, addressing problems of place, social processes, human experience, methods, and archives. Includes short research assignments.

URB 201 WWS 201 SOC 203 ARC 207 / Introduction to Urban Studies / Instructor: M. Christine Boyer

This course will examine different crises confronting cities in the 21st century. Topics will range from informal settlements, to immigration, terrorism, shrinking population, sprawl, rising seas, affordable housing, gentrification, smart cities. The range of cities will include Los Angles, New Orleans, Paris, Logos, Caracas, Havana, New York, Hong Kong, Dubai among others.

URB 202 JRN 202 LAO 232 / Documentary Film and the City / Instructor: Purcell Carson

How can a specific, character-driven documentary effectively shed light on complex social issues? How do the methods we use to observe the world shape the stories we tell? In this seminar in non-fiction film, we will work at the intersection of journalism and portraiture, applying these questions to the topic of migration between Guatemala and Trenton. Readings, screenings and discussion will deepen our understanding of the issues, while giving shape to our filmmaking. Collaborating with students in Guatemala, we will explore the tools of observational cinema, rigors of field producing and ethics of relationships with documentary subjects.

LAS 218 URB 218 / Social Justice: The Latin American City / Instructor: Ben Gerlofs

This course deals with difficult questions of how urban social justice is understood, demanded, pursued, and meted out. The UN reports that more than half of the world's population now lives in cities, a transformation especially profound in Latin America. In this course, we will critically assess both this urban terrain and the tools and theories we use to apprehend it, from `environmental racism' to the 'circuits of capital', and from the 'Pink Tide' to the 'post-political'.

ARC 312 URB 312 / Technology and the City: The Architectural Implications of the Networked Urban Landscape / Instructor: Andrew Laing

The seminar explores the implications of technologically networked cities for architectural programming and the design of spaces and places, including: 1) how information technology is reshaping the nature of architectural programming and our ideas of spaces, places and community; 2) how programs for spaces, buildings, places, and the city are being transformed by the increasing mobility, fluidity, and "blurring" of activities in space; and 3) the history of ideas that shape our understanding of technology and urbanism, programming and architecture: the networked global city; the sentient city; smart cities; big data; and hybrid places.

CEE 262A ARC 262A EGR 262A URB 262A ART 262 / Structures and the Urban Environment / Instructor: Maria Garlock

Known as "Bridges", this course focuses on structural engineering as a new art form begun during the Industrial Revolution and flourishing today in long-span bridges, thin shell concrete vaults, and tall buildings. Through critical analysis of major works, students are introduced to the methods of evaluating engineered structures as an art form. Students study the works and ideas of individual engineers through their basic calculations, their builder's mentality and their aesthetic imagination. Illustrations are taken from various cities and countries thus demonstrating the influence of culture on our built environment.

ENV 377 CEE 377 SAS 377 URB 377 / Sustainable Cities in the US and India: Technology, Policy & Entrepreneurship Pathways / Instructor: Anu Ramaswami

ENV 381 JRN 381 URB 381 / Climate Change as Threat (and Opportunity) Multiplier / Instructor: Meera Subramanian

The US Department of Defense has called climate change a ''threat multiplier," referencing military bases inundated by sea level rise and increased global political instability from extreme weather events. But every aspect of life on earth, for humans and other living creatures, is changing because of a rapidly warming planet. This class will explore everything from the state of songbirds to the national security concerns of war hawks to agriculture to urban design to storytelling to social justice. The aim is to understand how climate change exacerbates existing struggles and how innovative climate solutions might help ease them.

FALL 2019

URB 205 ARC 205 LAS 225 ENV 205 / Interdisciplinary Design Studio / Instructor: Mario I. Gandelsonas, Danielle Stewart

URB 225 ANT 227 / Urban Anthropology / Instructor: Mark Drury

According to the UN, by 2050, two-thirds of the world's population will live in cities. Urban life -- whether or not that means living in close proximity to each other, interacting with infrastructure, or new experimentations with the built environment -- has an impact upon how we experience the world and our sense of place. In this class, we will discuss theory on urbanism, infrastructure, and urban anthropology, and we will conduct observations about the built environment in and around campus. This class should be of interest to those interested in urban theory, anthropology, or architecture.

URB 300 ARC 300 HUM 300 SLA 300 / Urban Studies Research Seminar / Instructors: Katherine Reischl, Aaron Shkuda

This seminar introduces urban studies research methods through two cultural capitals: Moscow and New York. Focused on communities and landmarks represented in historical accounts, literary works, art and film, we will travel through these cityscapes as cultural and mythological spaces - from the past to the present day. We will examine how standards of evidence shape what is knowable about cities and urban life, what "counts" as knowledge in urban studies, and how these different disciplinary perspectives construct and limit knowledge about cities as a result. This course includes a 2019 Fall Break trip to Moscow, made possible through the Humanities Council’s David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Project and the Exploration Seminars program, funded by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS) in cooperation with the Office of International Programs (OIP).

URB 385 SOC 385 HUM 385 ARC 385 / Mapping Gentrification / Instructor: Aaron Shkuda

This seminar introduces the study of gentrification, with a focus on mapping projects using GIS (Geographic Information Systems) software. Readings, films, and site visits will situate the topic, as the course examines how racial landscapes of gentrification, culture and politics have been influenced by and helped drive urban change. Tutorials in ArcGIS will allow students to convert observations of urban life into fresh data and work with existing datasets. Learn to read maps critically, undertake multifaceted spatial analysis, and master new cartographic practices associated with emerging scholarship in the Digital and Urban Humanities.

URB 388 HIS 388 AMS 380 / Unrest and Renewal in Urban America / Instructor: Alison E. Isenberg

This course surveys the history of cities in the United States from colonial settlement to the present. Over centuries, cities have symbolized democratic ideals of immigrant "melting pots" and cutting-edge innovation, as well as urban crises of disorder, decline, crime, and poverty. Urban life has concentrated extremes like rich and poor; racial and ethnic divides; philanthropy and greed; skyscrapers and parks; violence and hope; center and suburb. The course examines how cities in U.S. history have brokered revolution, transformation and renewal, focusing on class, race, gender, immigration, capitalism, and the built environment.

ARC 526 / Research in Urbanism: Whatever Happened to Urbanism? A New Orleans Case Study / Instructor: M. Christine Boyer

In three essays written in 1994, "Bigness, or the problem of Large Manifesto," "Whatever Happened to Urbanism?" and "The Generic City," Koolhaas blames architects for ignoring the facts of urban existence, its increasing complexity, formlessness, incessant flux and variations. And he mocks city planners, likening them to chess players who have lost to computers, threatened by processes that go on of their own accord expanding towards infinity. Taking Rem Koolhaas' statements as a framework, this course asks what has happened to architectural research on `Urbanism' since the 1970s?

URB 237 SPA 227 EPS 277 / Contemporary Issues in Spain / Instructor: Germán Labrador Méndez

What is happening in Spain today? Using films and documentaries (and various materials: newspaper articles, YouTube clips, graffiti, etc.), we will study topics such as urban struggles, social movements, global crisis, historical memory, multiculturalism, gender identities, urban cultures, collective fictions, digital cultures, populisms and migration crisis. Those who are planning to apply for the Princeton-in-Spain program and/or pursue a certificate in Spanish or concentration in the Department will find this course to be a fantastic passport.

URB 280 JRN 280 / The Literature of Fact: The Urban World / Instructor: Kushanava Choudhury

For the first time, more human beings today live in cities than in villages worldwide, and urban populations are expected to only grow. This course will explore the social and cultural dimensions of the modern urban form by learn how cities have been written about in the past and how to write about cities in the future. Students will read classic pieces of writing on modern cities as well as new works that break away from old forms and erase the divisions between such genres as cultural criticism, ethnography, and reportage. They will learn how to write field notes, do interviews, use archival sources, and structure a long-form essay.

URB 309 ANT 309 STC 310 / Forensic Anthropology and Urban Bodies / Instructors: Jeffrey D. Himpele, Janet Monge

Forensic anthropology involves medico-legal cases where human remains have lost "personhood" (an individual cannot be identified due to decomposition or destruction of unique personal features). We will learn techniques that biological anthropologists apply to these cases to identify certain social attributes. We will also blend both biological and social anthropology to analyze human variation and well-being in urban settings. Working with real-world data, students will identify and trace the intertwined physiological, social and environmental factors that have shaped the growth and development of Philadelphia-area children over decades.

URB 324 LAS 324 SOC 314 / The Urban Revolution in Latin America / Instructor: Ben A. Gerlofs

This course examines the rapid urbanization of Latin America, focusing especially on the political, economic, environmental, demographic, and cultural/aesthetic dimensions of urbanization processes and their implications. Topics to include: urban resource wars, gentrification and neighborhood change, planetary urbanization, vanguard urbanism, and the politics of aesthetics. Lectures and reading material will explore these issues across such paradigmatic urban places as Rio de Janeiro, Cochabamba, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, and Bogotá.

URB 401 ARC 401 / Theories of Housing and Urbanism / Instructor: Andrew Laing

The seminar will explore theories of urbanism and housing by reading canonical writers who have created distinctive and influential ideas about urbanism and housing from the nineteenth century to the present. The writers are architects, planners, and social scientists. The theories are interdisciplinary. One or two major works will be discussed each week. We will critically evaluate their relevance and significance for architecture now. Topics include: modernism, technological futurism, density, the new urbanism, the networked city, landscape urbanism, and sustainable urbanism.

URB 471 CEE 471 GEO 471 / Introduction to Water Pollution Technology / Instructor: Peter R. Jaffé

An introduction to the science of water quality management and pollution control in natural systems; fundamentals of biological and chemical transformations in natural waters; identification of sources of pollution; water and wastewater treatment methods; fundamentals of water quality modeling.

EAS 260 / Japan's Media Mix: Anime/Cinema/Gaming / Instructor: Franz K. Prichard

This course surveys Japan's vibrant media mix cultures spanning the histories of anime, cinema and gaming through the intersections of film and media studies. Charting the emergence of media mix cultures and "new" media technologies from silent film to augmented reality in Japan, this course introduces students to major works of anime (animated feature films, television series, and other formats), cinema, and video games. We will examine the changing contours of work and play, sentiment and sensation, thought and materiality, and the forms of mediation and social relation that defined Japan's modern media mix ecologies and platforms.

ARC 519 / Climate Change, Adaptation and Urban Design / Instructor: Guy Nordenson

Climate change adaptation is a pressing and difficult challenge to urban design, ecological and engineering planning theory and practice. It is clear that architects, planners, engineers and designers have an important role to help cities contend with climate adaptation. This seminar reviews the general state of science and practice of climate change and adaptation with a primary focus on the United States. It looks to the work of Frederick Law Olmsted for some of the theoretical basis of developing an approach to climate adaptation that is democratic and progressive and evaluate the impediments which restrict change.

SPRING 2019

ARC 384 ENV 374 / Design and Planning for Climate Equity: Urban Vulnerability and Adaptation / Instructor: Zachary Lamb

Vulnerability to climate change is highly uneven; some people and places face greater risks than others. Efforts to adapt cities to those impacts impose uneven costs, frequently exacerbating existing inequalities. This course explores how urban planners and designers shape climate change adaptation. There will be three main components: 1) an introduction to foundational theories of uneven vulnerability and adaptation; 2) case studies of adaptation in cities around the world; and 3) a semester project focused on the equity implications and transformative potentials of a major regional adaptation proposal, the “Meadowlands Climate Park.”

ARC 383 URB 383 NES 382 / Spaces of Conflict and Everyday Life / Instructor: Noam Shoked

This course examines the relationship between architecture and politics by focusing on the role of the built environment in twentieth and twenty-first century conflicts. We will examine how settler colonialism shapes places, how sectarian conflicts divide cities and how protest movements utilize urban areas. The class will pay particular attention to the everyday practices of the people who inhabit, appropriate and transform these sites. We will look at a number of case studies from the Middle East, Africa, and North America, and embark on ethnographic investigations of specific sites in New York.

ARC 527 ENV 527 / Provisioning: Food, Architecture and Urbanism in the Global 20th Century / Instructor: Meredith TenHoor

After the industrialization of agriculture, what does it mean to provision a population or a city? How can food systems be designed, how do we understand the intersections between bodily need, regulation, economies, and the work of architects and urbanists? What opportunities might designers and thinkers have to create better labor conditions and ecologies in our food systems, and to add pleasure to the daily ritual of consumption? In this course, we examine the long modern history of spaces and philosophies of food systems, and South-North relationships that emerge through these systems.

ARC 380 DAN 310 THR 323 URB 310 / The Arts of Urban Transition / Instructors: Aaron Landsman, Aaron Shkuda

ARC 300 URB 300 HUM 300 SLA 300 / Urban Studies Research Seminar / Instructors: Katherine Reischl, Aaron Shkuda

This seminar introduces urban studies research methods through two cultural capitals: Moscow and New York. Focused on communities and landmarks represented in historical accounts, literary works, art and film, we will travel through these cityscapes as cultural and mythological spaces - from the past to the present day. We will examine how standards of evidence shape what is knowable about cities and urban life, what "counts" as knowledge in urban studies, and how these different disciplinary perspectives construct and limit knowledge about cities as a result.

WWS Research Seminar / U.S. Cities: New Policy for Old Places / Instructor: Alison Isenberg

This seminar will survey core policy issues facing U.S. cities, equipping students to frame and complete significant, original research projects. Topics include: affordable housing, business development, migration and immigration, education and youth, employment, transportation, infrastructure, open space, urban design, cultural institutions, real estate and gentrification, environmental health, climate change, and policing. In addition to this overview approach, each student will research a chosen area of urban policy expertise, with the flexibility to define the scope--local, regional, or national.

ARC 595 / The Zoning of Things / Instructor: V. Mitch McEwen

This course introduces students to zoning as an urbanistic tool related to representation, classification, and design. Readings investigate zoning as a form of both ideation and technology through texts that include Michel Foucault, Aristotle, Walter Benjamin, Christopher Alexander, Keller Easterling and Isabelle Stengers, as well as the Zoning Resolution of the City of New York, video games, films, and canonical urban plans.

ARC 492 URB 492 ENV 492 / Topics in the Formal Analysis of the Urban Structure - Environmental Challenges of Urban Sprawl / Instructor: Mario Gandelsonas

ARC 205 URB 205 ENV 205 LAS 225 / Interdisciplinary Design Studio / Instructor: Elisa Silva

URB 201 WWS 201 SOC 203 ARC 207 / Introduction to Urban Studies / Instructor: M. Christine Boyer

This course will examine different crises confronting cities in the 21st century. Topics will range from informal settlements, to immigration, terrorism, shrinking population, sprawl, rising seas, affordable housing, gentrification, smart cities. The range of cities will include Los Angles, New Orleans, Paris, Logos, Caracas, Havana, New York, Hong Kong, Dubai among others.

LAS 212 URB 212 / Latin American Soundscapes / Instructor: Leonardo Cardoso

The course offers an introduction to sound-making and listening across Latin America. It pays attention to music, noise, urban space, and technology. Students conduct ethnographic research and carry out field recordings in the New Jersey area. The course draws on anthropological, sociological, and historical accounts to explore the relationship between music and national symbols in Jamaica and Brazil; the tension between orality and literacy in local forms of speech; and the role of infrastructure, architecture, rituals and visual representations in urban soundscapes.

ARC 262A CEE 262A EGR 262A URB 262A / ART 262 / Structures and the Urban Environment / Instructor: Maria Garlock

Known as "Bridges", this course focuses on structural engineering as a new art form begun during the Industrial Revolution and flourishing today in long-span bridges, thin shell concrete vaults, and tall buildings. Through critical analysis of major works, students are introduced to the methods of evaluating engineered structures as an art form. Students study the works and ideas of individual engineers through their basic calculations, their builder's mentality and their aesthetic imagination. Illustrations are taken from various cities and countries thus demonstrating the influence of culture on our built environment.

URB 302 GHP 303 / Grassroots Power: Health and Social Change through Collective Action / Instructors: Jerry Nutor, Sebastian Ramirez

This seminar provides a practical and theoretical toolkit for students interested in health disparities and social change. We will consider how critical perspectives on health, violence and the environment can create the grounds for broader social change. Through a multidisciplinary focus, we will look at how social change is conceptualized and assessed by experts, beneficiaries, and critics. Drawing lessons from the ACT UP, Black Lives Matter, reproductive rights and #MeToo, for example, we will examine how individuals and groups use technology and organize to change the status quo, reimagining ideas of justice and equity from the ground up.

LAS 308 URB 308 ENV 345 / Mexico City: Geography, Politics and Everyday Life / Instructor: Ben Gerlofs

Explore the geography of Mexico City, one of the world's largest and most dynamic urban communities. We examine such topics as the city's rapid expansion during the 20th century, its architectural and aesthetic styles and transformations, its environments and environmental crises, and the shape of its contemporary political geographies. Field study in Mexico City during spring recess will have a special focus on social and spatial aspects of urban redevelopment and neighborhood change.

ARC 312 URB 312 / Technology and the City: the Architectural Implications of the networked Urban Landscape / Instructor: Andrew Laing

ARC 316 ART 312 URB 314 FRE 312 / The Art of Living / Instructor: Basile Baudez

Water in the bathroom, gas in the kitchen, heat in the living room: what Western Europe and North America consider basic needs in obvious, purpose-based, domestic spaces are relatively new. All appeared between the late 17th and early 20th centuries. What dynamic between society and family that made the emergence of the apartment building possible? What motivated authorities and private developers to support public infrastructures, from sewage systems to street lights, gas and water networks? This course will provide students with tools to criticize the notion of domestic comfort, public efficiency, urbanism, and "progress."

SPA 365 LAO 365 URB 365 / Rapping in Spanish: Urban Poetry in Latino Global Cities / Instructor: Germán Labrador Méndez

This course studies contemporary urban poetry composed in Spanish on both sides of the Atlantic in cities such as New York, Madrid, Los Angeles, Mexico D.F., Barcelona and Buenos Aires. It focuses on lyrical practices that combine sound and language in a wide range of literary expressions. Contemporary hip-hop poetry and rap lyrics are at the center of the course.

ARC 389 URB 389 / Urban Futures and Scenarios / Instructor: Marshall Brown

Urbanism requires anticipatory and transdisciplinary thought about the future, which is uncertain by definition. Scenario planning and futures studies provide the techniques and conceptual frameworks for developing strategy in spaces of uncertainty. This seminar will provide an introduction to fundamental techniques and concepts from the practices of scenario planning and apply them to specific questions about the future of cities and metropolitan areas.

URB 451 HIS 451 AMS 413 / Writing about Cities / Instructor: Sean Fraga

Princeton’s monuments tell the story of the past. But whose stories, and whose past? These are questions both here at Princeton, as we discuss the role of slavery in the University’s history and Woodrow Wilson’s legacy on campus, and in larger national conversations about the presence of Confederate monuments and representation of historically marginalized groups. In this moment of national reckoning with public memory and public spaces, we can ask: How are places made? Who remembers the past, and how? And what stories do we want our public spaces to tell in the future? We’ll learn to read the built environment as a multi-authored text by engaging in cultural analysis, archival research, and geographic fieldwork. Second, we’ll speak with key people with Princeton’s libraries, art museum, architect’s office, and the Princeton & Slavery project. Finally, we’ll contribute to ongoing discussions about place and memory and develop proposals for new monuments for Princeton’s campus, which we’ll present to Princeton’s Campus Iconography Committee and community members at the end of the term.

ARC 525 ART 524 / Mapping the City: Cities and Cinema / instructor: M. Christine Boyer

This course on cartographic cinema explores the digital film archive as a trove of images that can be re-appropriated, re-mixed, re-assembled into new ways of thinking about and imagining cities. Cutting a horizontal trajectory across cities --- New York, Tokyo, Vienna, Paris, Hong Kong, Lagos, Calcutta --- the cinema has captured the dynamic force of urban mutations and disruptions. It has also imposed a vertical axis of memories, confounding meaning and points of view, especially in cities of trauma.

FALL 2018

HIS 388 URB 388 (HA) / Unrest and Renewal in Urban America / Instructor: Alison E. Isenberg

This course surveys the history of cities in the United States from colonial settlement to the present. Over centuries, cities have symbolized democratic ideals of immigrant "melting pots" and cutting-edge innovation, as well as urban crises of disorder, decline, crime, and poverty. Urban life has concentrated extremes like rich and poor; racial and ethnic divides; philanthropy and greed; skyscrapers and parks; violence and hope; center and suburb. The course examines how cities in U.S. history have brokered revolution, transformation and renewal, focusing on class, race, gender, immigration, capitalism, and the built environment.

ARC 205 URB 205 LAS 225 ENV 205 (LA) / Interdisciplinary Design Studio / Instructor: Mario I. Gandelsonas, Aiala Levy

URB 385 SOC 385 HUM 385 ARC 385 / Mapping Gentrification / Instructor: Aaron Shkuda

HUM 310 COM 371 URB 311 / Camp/Prison/Border / Instructor: Nasser Abourahme

From the 19th century colonial era to the current border/migration crisis, camps and prisons have managed surplus and racialized populations through zones of confinement and exception. It is literature, and particularly the novel, that provides the compelling encounters with questions of confinement and movement. This course approaches the "border crisis" through a combination of readings in political theory/history and global literature, situating it in the longer history of population management and equipping students with the methodological tools for thinking about it across the social sciences/humanities divide.

URB 202 JRN 202 LAO 232 (LA) / Documentary Film and the City / Instructor: Purcell Carson

Non-fiction film workshop through lens of Trenton's Latinx population, particularly Central American immigrants. Through films, readings, guest lectures, and hands-on filmmaking, students will study history and strategies of migrant populations, culture of remittance between global north and south, and immigration policy. Student collaboration with community partners to research, produce and edit short films. Specific journalistic, ethical, and cinematic challenges of non-fiction filmmaking. Exploring documentary balances between sociological study, mimetic art form, and engaged voice in public media. Two public screenings of student films.

POL 403 CHV 403 ARC 405 URB 403 / Architecture and Democracy / Instructor: Jan-Werner Müller

What kind of public architecture is appropriate for a democracy? Should public spaces and buildings reflect democratic values - such as transparency and accessibility - or is the crucial requirement for democratic architecture that the process of arriving at decisions about the built environment is as participatory as possible? Is gentrification somehow un-democratic? The course will introduce students to different theories of democracy, to different approaches to architecture, and to many examples of architecture and urban planning from around the world, via images and films. Might include a field trip.

CEE 471 GEO 471 URB 471 (STN) / Introduction to Water Pollution Technology / Instructor: Peter R. Jaffé

SOC 227 URB 227 (SA) / Race and Ethnicity / Instructor: Patricia Fernández-Kelly

Our goal in this course is (a) to understand various definitions of race and ethnicity from a theoretical perspective and in a plurality of contexts and (b) to account for the rise of ethnicity and race as political and cultural forces in the age of globalization. Why are ethnic and racial delimitations expanding in areas of the world where such distinctions were formerly muted? Is race and racial discrimination all the same regardless of geographical region? What are the main theories and methodologies now available for the study of race and ethnicity from a comparative point of view?

URB 200 WWS 210 SOC 200 (SA) / Urbanism and Urban Policy / Instructor: Douglas S. Massey

Introduces students to social scientific thinking on cities and urbanism and then builds on this base to consider and evaluate various approaches to urban policy.

ARC 526 / Research in Urbanism: 1968 and the Archive / Instructors: M. Christine Boyer, Aaron Shkuda

This course utilizes a series of readings and archive visits to ask, how did urban policy, urban planning, and architecture shape the critical sites of 1968? Through readings and research we ask how does the legacy of this time act as an abstract force haunting the profession of architecture even today?

SPRING 2018

AMS 395 THR 395 AAS 395 HIS 296 / Performing the City: Race and Protest in 1960s Trenton and Princeton / Instructors: Alison E. Isenberg, Aaron Landsman

Through original research and creative process, this seminar immerses students in overlapping histories of race, protest, political mobilization and violence in 1960s Trenton and Princeton. Students will contribute to an archive, conduct interviews and make maps, and then use their research to create performance walks on campus and in Trenton. By combining disciplines, the course addresses questions such as: How can we change a place by walking through it with new knowledge? How do the imprints of various, even conflicting histories, impact the built environment? After the semester, students' final project tours will be offered regularly.

ARC 301 ENV 301 SAS 302 URB 301 / Nature and Infrastructure in South Asia / Instructor: Ateya Khorakiwala

South Asia is often imagined as a chaotic place where infrastructure is in a constant battle against the forces of nature. Monsoon rains erode roads, summer heat shuts down power grids, winter snow closes vehicular access, while dry riverbeds open new routes. On the contrary, infrastructure is also imagined as the only means by which the vagaries of nature and geography can be overcome. How then, can we understand these nebulous terms upon which a utopian imagination of the future is grounded?

ARC 303 URB 303 EGR 303 HUM 303 SOC 306 / Wall Street and Silicon Valley: Place in the American Economy / Instructor: Aaron Shkuda

This course examines two places that play an outsized role in the American economy: Wall Street and Silicon Valley. They are distinct and similarly enduring locations. They embody a divide between urban and suburban, East Coast and West Coast, skyscrapers and office parks, tradition and innovation, conservative and liberal. Despite the ubiquity of electronic trading, firms still congregate in Lower Manhattan. Tech workers fight traffic to maintain a presence in Mountain View. What makes these places endure? How do their histories, architecture, economic dynamics, and distinct cultures shape them as places?

ARC 348 ENV 348 / The Modern Environmental Imagination: People, Place, Planet / Instructor: Chad L. Monfreda

This course explores the history of the environmental imagination from the Age of Exploration of early modern Europe to the global environmental politics of today. We will trace the ways in which people have imagined themselves and nature have shifted over time, and how these changes have helped shape science and politics in the modern world. The course also examines more recent efforts in the arts and sciences to re-imagine humans and nature in order to grapple with the rapidly changing world of contemporary global environmental politics, with a particular focus on the challenges of urbanization, biodiversity loss, and climate change.

ARC 492 URB 492 ENV 492 / Topics in the Formal Analysis of the Urban Structure - Environmental Challenges of Urban Sprawl / Instructor: Mario Gandelsonas

As part of the search for solutions to climate, water and energy challenges in a rapidly urbanizing world, it is crucial to understand and reassess the role of exurban sprawl in the environment. This interdisciplinary course aims to add theoretical, pragmatic and cultural dimensions to scientific, technological, and policy aspects of current environmental challenges, in an effort to bridge the environmental sciences, urbanism and the humanities.

ARC 200 URB 205 ENG 391 AAS 391 / Experimenting in Dark Times: 19th C African American Literature, Culture & Spatial Imaginary / Instructors: Autumn M. Womack, V. Mitch McEwen

This interdisciplinary course will explore the intersecting worlds of late 19th-century African American literature, technology, visual culture, aesthetics, and reform. Although this period is commonly theorized as the "Nadir," or "dark point," of Black life, it was in fact a moment of artistic innovation and social experimentation as black artists, writers, and activists traversed a range of modes and media in the hopes of imagining new futures. We will tease out the nuances of this often overlooked cultural moment, while developing an understanding of black experimental writing's roots. In design studio, students will design historically experimental urban projects around the literature and media investigated in the weekly seminar.

ARC 312 URB 312 / Technology and the City: the Architectural Implications of the networked Urban Landscape / Instructor: Andrew Laing

ARC 526 / Research in Urbanism: Whatever Happened to Urbanism? / Instructor: M. Christine Boyer

In three essays written in 1994, "Bigness, or the problem of Large Manifesto," "Whatever Happened to Urbanism?" and "The Generic City," Koolhaas blames architects for ignoring the facts of urban existence, its increasing complexity, formlessness, incessant flux and variations. And he mocks city planners, likening them to chess players who have lost to computers, threatened by processes that go on of their own accord expanding towards infinity. Taking Rem Koolhaas' statements as a framework, this course asks what has happened to architectural research on `Urbanism' since the 1970s?

ARC 576 MOD 502 ART 598 / Advanced Topics in Modern Architecture - The Perversions of Modern Architecture / Instructor: Beatriz Colomina

Modern architecture was never straightforward. Despite the surface rhetoric of rationality, clarity and efficiency, modern architects were engaged with everything that escapes rationality: sexuality, violence, exoteric philosophies, occultism, disease, the psyche, pharmacology, extraterrestrial life, artificial intelligence, chance, the primitive, the fetish, etc. Through a series of case studies from the early twentieth century till today, of both mainstream figures and misfits, the class will explore the backwaters of modern architecture to reveal the astonishing richness and eccentricity of the field.

ENV 315 URB 325 VIS 325 / The Port of New Orleans: Culture and Climate Change / Instructor: Jeffrey Whetstone

New Orleans is decades ahead of any other U.S. city with respect to climate change. The city's culture embodies exuberance and improvisation, and inspires confidence, openness, and collaboration. These qualities, married with scientific inquiry, may be a strategy for the city's survival. Visiting scholars and artists show how cooperation between cultural and scientific communities can provide valuable, sustainable strategies. The class will spend Spring Break in New Orleans visiting sites of artistic and scientific intervention. Students will create models, media, and other creative works in response to research data.

ENV 332 ENG 437 / Petrofiction / Instructor: Ashley J. Dawson

We know that we must cease using fossil fuels with all due haste if the planet is to avert a climate catastrophe, and yet the odds of making this transition seem long. This is due not only to the political clout of Big Oil, but also to the ways in which oil saturates every aspect of life, from the clothes we wear to the food we eat. Yet neither the dazzling benefits nor the dramatic damages of this ubiquitous petroculture are evenly distributed. Surveying literature, film, music and the visual arts, this course renders the material and social circuits of petroculture visible that they might be better challenged and transformed.

HIS 418 URB 418 / Imagined Cities / Instructor: Gyan Prakash

HIS 456 AAS 456 URB 456 HUM 456 / New Orleans at 300: Invention & Reinvention in an American City / Instructor: Joshua B. Guild

As it commemorates its tercentennial, this course explores the history of what has been described as an "impossible but inevitable city" over three centuries. Settled on perpetually shifting swampland at the foot of one of the world's great waterways, this port city served as an outpost of three empires and a gateway linking the N. American heartland with the Gulf Coast, Caribbean, and Atlantic World. From European and African settlement through the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, we will consider how race, culture, and the environment have defined the history of the city and its people.

SOC 207 / Poverty in America / Instructors: Matthew Desmond, Kathryn Edin

This course investigates poverty in America in historical and contemporary perspective. We will explore central aspects of poverty, including low-wage work and joblessness, housing and neighborhoods, crime and punishment, and survival and protest. Along the way, we will examine the cause and consequences of poverty; study the lived experience of severe deprivation and material hardship; evaluate large-scale anti-poverty programs with an eye toward what worked and what didn't; and engage with normative debates about the right to housing, living wages, just punishment, and other matters pertaining to American life below the poverty line.

SOC 413 / Spatial Analysis in the Social Sciences / Instructor: Elizabeth M. Roberto

This course introduces core concepts and tools for analyzing spatial data. Students will gain hands-on experience creating spatial data (e.g., geocoding and merging data sources), producing and interpreting maps, and describing and analyzing spatial patterns and relationships. Drawing on examples in housing, health, education, public policy, and urban studies, students will learn how to apply spatial reasoning in the empirical analysis of social phenomenon and use spatial methods to answer questions about the geographic distribution of social problems, the organization of communities, and the relationship between society and the environment.

FALL 2017

URB 202 HIS 202 HUM 202 VIS 200 / Documentary Film and the City / Instructors: Alison Isenberg, Purcell Carson

This hands-on urban studies seminar in documentary film making and history focuses on Trenton's unrest of April 1968, when a black college student, Harlan Joseph, was shot and killed by a white police officer. The course works outward from these events to examine the 1960's, race, region, economy, memory, and media representation. Students produce their own short films and related research papers using their own field work and shared archives sources. Collaborative assignments will contribute to works of scholarship and a documentary produced by the professors. Includes public screening of student work.

ARC 205 URB 205 LAS 225 ENV 205 / Interdisciplinary Design Studio / Instructors: Mario Gandelsonas, Anthony Acciavatti

URB 300 HUM 300 ARC 300 WWS 392 / Urban Studies Research Seminar / Instructor: Aaron Shkuda

This interdisciplinary seminar introduces research methods in urban studies. We will focus on some of the ways in which researchers make sense of cities, including various aspects of urban experience, culture, history, theory, form, and policy. Students will use the analytical frameworks covered in the course to develop their own research projects with the goal of developing more dynamic junior papers and senior theses.

ENV 323 / The Nature of the City / Instructor: Ashley J. Dawson

This interdisciplinary seminar examines the production of urban nature. Nature and the city are usually seen as separate, even antithetical, yet cities are now responsible for the majority of carbon emissions that cause climate change. Generating a creative politics of nature in and for the city is consequently a key component of contemporary environmentalism. Reading across fields such as architecture, geography, and postcolonial studies, we will explore the material and social infrastructures through which nature is metabolized in cities, as well as the representations (fictional and otherwise) through which urban nature is depicted.

URB 385 SOC 385 HUM 385 ARC 385 / Mapping Gentrification / Instructor: Aaron Shkuda

HIS 388 URB 388 / Unrest and Renewal in Urban America / Instructor: Alison Isenberg

For centuries cities have embodied U.S. hopes and fears, symbolizing ideals of democratic melting pots and cultural innovation, as well as urban "problems" and crisis. Urban life distilled extremes like rich and poor; parks and skyscrapers; philanthropy and greed; racial and ethnic divides; violence and hope; center and suburb. By producing contrasts and conflicts, cities brokered transformation, rebellion and renewal. Course covers social life, politics, economy, revolutionary ideologies, culture, race, gender, and the built environment--from the colonial era to the present.

ARC 525 MOD 524 / Mapping the City / Instructor: M. Christine Boyer

A seminar focusing on city imagery and architectural entertainments by examining different methods of framing the city through travel, in the theater, through the invention of traditions, at the museum, from the cinema, or through its architectural composition and spatial configuration.

HUM 595 ARC 593 MOD 551 / Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities: What is a material? History, Architecture, Environment / Instructors: Lucia Allais, Forrest Meggers

Materialism has returned to the forefront of humanistic speculation, as scholars rethink how to be human in the face of environmental change. Today, who counts as a historical and/or environmental agent depends largely on what one thinks a material is. This course mines the history of architecture and its allied engineering for technical and philosophical perspectives on this material turn. We alternate seminar discussions (on themes such as solidity, invisibility, aggregation, operability, wires) and workshops (where guest scientists, historians, practitioners lead us in experiments in thinking and making).

SPRING 2017

ARC 321 / Landscapes of Development / Instructor: Ayala Levin

This research seminar examines the relationship between architecture, resources, and territory in 20th century modernization projects in the U.S., Latin America, the Middle East, South East Asia, and Africa. We will explore the conditions in which architecture has become a tool of development (a concept which we will address critically), and the functions it assumed in the ordering and managing of labor, natural resources and industry. The seminar will conclude with an exhibition composed of students' research into a selected group of historical and/or contemporary projects and a public symposium.

SPA 360 AAS 361 AMS 375 LAO 360 / Urban Diversity and Segregation in the Americas / Instructor: Bruno M. Carvalho

Diversity has sometimes been viewed as a source of vitality and strength, other times as a threat to cultural or national cohesion. This seminar explores histories of segregation and debates about diversity in a hemispheric framework, asking: how can Latin American perspectives inform our understanding of the U.S.? How has the U.S. shaped urban developments in Latin America, as a model or cautionary tale? What is the interplay between identity politics and moral values? Urbanism and ethics? How does diversity relate to inclusion, difference, and inequality? Topics include immigration, globalization, social justice, planning, race and racism.

ARC 466 ART 466 SPA 466 URB 466 / Havana's Architecture: Recent Past and Possible Features / Instructors: Esther Roseli da Costa Azevedo Meyer, Eduardo Luis Rodriguez

A study of modern architecture and urbanism in Havana focusing on Art Deco, the International Style, the American presence (from the sugar mills to Guantanamo), the foreign modernists (Mies, Sert, Neutra, Philip Johnson), the Cuban revolution and the Soviet period, Critical Regionalism, the role of the environment, historical preservation, ruins and gentrification. It concludes with an analysis of the problems and potentials facing a post-Castro Havana.

ARC 525 ART 524 MOD 524 / Research into the Foundations of Urbanism / Instructors: M. Christine Boyer, Aaron Shkuda

This course asks what has happened to architectural research on "Urbanism" since the 1970s? How does the legacy of that decade act as an abstract force haunting the profession of architecture even today? In the last fifty years, there have been radical changes to cities around the globe. The public sector has given way to the dominance of the market economy, mega-cities have burst upon the world in expansive numbers, environmental issues demand action, computing power and digitization have changed the nature of architectural practice. How has 'urbanism' as both an empirical descriptive analysis of the condition of cities and as a model of intervention, a representational scenario, reflected, absorbed, or distorted these conditions?

ARC 597 HUM 597 MOD 575 LAS 597 / Humanistic Perspectives on History and Society - Havana: Architecture, Urbanism, and Literature in Transition / Instructors: Beatriz Colomina, Ruben Gallo

This seminar explores modern architecture and urbanism in Cuba, including the full kaleidoscope of historical, political, and cultural effects before and after the 1959 Revolution. Using the North-South relationship as the basic matrix, individual sessions will explore the spatial dimensions of a wide range of issues from revolution, utopia, cold war, prefabrication, tropical modernism, ruins, preservation, disease, sexuality, violence, resistance, etc. Through a series of case studies -- sites, buildings, urban projects -- we think of Cuba as a laboratory of modern architecture under the influence of multiple norths and souths.

ARC 492 URB 492 ENV 492 / Topics in the Formal Analysis of the Urban Structure - Environmental Challenges of Urban Sprawl / Instructor: Mario I. Gandelsonas

As part of the search for solutions to climate, water and energy challenges in a rapidly urbanizing world, it is crucial to understand and reassess the role of exurban sprawl in the environment. This interdisciplinary course aims to add theoretical, pragmatic and cultural dimensions to scientific, technological, and policy aspects of current environmental challenges, in an effort to bridge the environmental sciences, urbanism and the humanities.

ARC 554 LAS 507 SPA 601 / The World as Artifact: Tomás Maldonado and the Environmental Turn in Architecture / Instructor: Joaquin Medina Warmburg

The seminar addresses the environmental aspects of the design philosophy defined in 1970 by Argentine-born design theorist Tomás Maldonado during his scholarship in Princeton. His principal writings devoted to environmental/architectural issues are examined, placing them in their specific historical/cultural contexts. The course looks at a selection of eleven main concepts in order to introduce the students to Maldonado's critical position. The seminar focuses on the intellectual biography of this early Latin American theorizer of architecture as environmental design in a broad sense, including technical, political and social concerns.

FALL 2016

ART 344 / Art & Politics: From Tatlin's Tower to Occupy / Instructor: Irene V. Small

What is the political capacity of art? What is the aesthetic capacity of politics? This course examines key episodes, strategies, and formulations pertaining to the complex relationship between art and politics across the 20th century. Topics include experiments in radical abstraction and mass performance undertaken by the Russian avant-garde, the institutional politics of Mexican Muralism, painting and propaganda during the Cold War, guerilla interventions and military dictatorships, the AIDS crisis and artist activism, and recent social movements.

URB 300 HUM 300 ARC 300 WWS 392 / Urban Studies Research Seminar / Instructors: Bruno M. Carvalho, Aaron Shkuda

URB 202 HIS 202 HUM 202 VIS 200 / Documentary Film and the City / Instructors: Alison Isenberg,, Purcell Carson

This urban studies seminar in history and documentary film-making focuses on Trenton's unrest of April 1968, when a black college student, Harlan Joseph, was shot and killed by a white police officer. The course works outward from these events to examine the 1960s, race, region, economy, memory, and media representation. Students collect archival sources and help produce video interviews, culminating in their own research papers and short documentary films.

HIS 465 LAO 465 / Latino Urban History / Instructor: Rosina A. Lozano

Using the cities of Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Miami as case studies, this course seeks to understand the history of Latinos in urban places. Casting a geographically broad net and focusing largely on the 20th century, this course will comparatively analyze Latinos of different national origins (e.g. Mexican Americans, Cuban Americans, Puerto Ricans, Dominican Americans). In addition, the course will look at a broad cross-section of the Latino community to get at changing understandings of gender, class, race, and immigration status.

DAN 310 ARC 380 THR 323 URB 310 / The Arts of Urban Transition / Instructors: Judith Hamera, Aaron Landsman. Aaron Shkuda

This course uses texts and methods from history, theatre, performance studies, and dance to examine artists and works of art as agents of change in New York (1960-present) and contemporary Detroit. Issues addressed include relationships between artists, changing urban economies, and the built environment; the role of the artist in gentrification and creative placemaking; the importance of local history in art interventions; and assessing impacts of arts initiatives.

SPRING 2016

ARC 492 URB 492 ENV 492 / Environmental Challenges of Urban Sprawl / Instructors: Mario Gandelsonas, Elsa Devienne

ART 466 SPA 466 ARC 466 URB 466 / Havana: Architecture, Literature, Arts / Instructors: Michael G. Wood. Esther Roseli da Costa Azevedo Meyer

This seminar will study the urban setting of Havana in its articulation with literature, film, and the arts from the early twentieth century to the present day. It will explore cross-disciplinary continuities, the engagement with multiple pasts, the city as a meeting place for all the arts and crucible of social identities. There will be a mandatory trip to Havana during Spring break.

SPA 327 URB 327 LAO 327 / Latino Global Cities / Instructors: Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones, Germán Labrador Méndez

This seminar focuses on the comparative study of Latino urban cultures in U.S., Caribbean and Spanish cities (mainly New York City, San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Madrid, Spain). Topics include the 2008 Financial Crisis, Occupy-like movements, global migratory flows, popular culture, memory, debt, visuality and citizenship. Paying close attention to their political and cultural contexts, flamenco, hip-hop, graffiti, visual culture, poetry, documentary films and political performances will be analyzed. Guest speakers and musicians will be part of the conversation.

URB 385 SOC 385 HUM 385 ARC 385 / Mapping Gentrification / Instructor: Aaron Shkuda

FALL 2015

URB 202 HIS 202 HUM 202 VIS 200 / Documentary Film and the City / Instructor: Purcell Carson

This seminar uses non-fiction to explore issued facing the American city. It traces both urban history and the history of documentary through films about the city. The goal is to gain a greater understanding of urban history and the challenges cities face today as well as a foundation in the practical and theoretical issues of documentary.

AN 310 ARC 380 THR 323 URB 310 / The Arts of Urban Transition / Instructors: Judith Hamera, Aaron Landsman, Aaron Shkuda

This interdisciplinary course uses texts and methods from history, theatre, and dance to examine artists and works of art as agents of change in New York (1960-present) and contemporary Detroit. Issues include relationships between artists, changing urban economies, and the built environment; gentrification and creative placemaking; local history in art interventions; and impacts of urban arts initiatives. A fall break studio trip to Detroit, and visits to archives and sites in New York, are included.

LAS 505 ENG 506 ARC 540 HUM 505 URB 505 / Conflict Shorelines I / Amazonia: A Botanical Archaeology of Genocide / Instructors: Eduardo L. Cadava, Eyal Weizman

This course explores the relations among colonial history, contemporary conflicts, and climate change by examining the political, legal, epistemic, and aesthetic challenges this kind of violence initiates. Reading colonial and urban histories against meteorological and climate data, we use environmental modes of detection and imaging in order to reveal tropical forests to be archaeological resources in which patterns of human intervention and violence can be read. The Amazon is not only an ecological threshold, but also a political one, and it continues to bear the traces of the deadliest land conflicts in Brazil.

ARC 527 WWS 527b / Topics in Domestic Policy: Planning Methods and the Bronx / Instructors: M. Christine Boyer, Tom K. Wright

This inter-disciplinary course will demonstrate the necessity for solutions that integrate architecture and economic development, urban design and public services, cultural history and a public realm strategy, investment and policy. In doing so, the course will investigate new models for equitable and sustainable growth in American cities, and how to build a future of the Bronx for the residents of the Bronx.

URB 300 HUM 300 ARC 300 WWS 392 / Urban Studies Research Seminar / Instructors: Bruno M. Carvalho, Aaron Shkuda

This interdisciplinary seminar introduces research methods in urban studies. We will focus on some of the ways in which researchers make sense of cities, including various aspects of urban experience, culture, history, theory, form, and policy. Students will use the analytical frameworks covered in the course to develop their own research projects with the goal of developing more dynamic junior papers and senior theses.

SPRING 2015

ARC 449 / Making Sense of the City / Instructors: Johana Londoño, Mariana Mogilevich

This course starts from the premise that to engage the spatial politics of cities of the Americas, we must engage with the senses. We will ask how vision, affect, and smell shape our understandings of and connections to urban space. And conversely, how different spaces condition our sensorial experiences. Employing the critical, interpretive and theoretical knowledge of the humanities, we examine how these sensorial markers of belonging in urban spaces relate to and expand social markers of citizenship, political boundaries, gender, class, race, and ethnicity.

ART 388 SOC 388 AMS 388 ARC 388 / Photo, Urbanism and Civic Change Between 1960-1980 / Instructors: Katherine Anne Bussard, Aaron Shkuda

In conjunction with the concurrent exhibition The City Lost and Found, this course focuses on an extraordinary period of visual responses to the changing fabric of America's three largest cities: New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. We explore their seismic transformations, from political protests to urban renewal projects. Students assess original artworks, films, texts, photographs, and a variety of print media (all on view in the Princeton University Art Museum) and analyze readings from disciplines as diverse as cultural geography, urban planning, urban theory, and art history.

ATL 497 ENV 497 / Princeton Atelier: Performing Environmental Stories / Instructors: Kelly Christine Baum, Jenny Price

The term “social practice” refers to an increasingly popular form of public art that takes a participatory and often lighthearted approach to urgent social and political issues. In this Atelier, we will create an eco-corps that focuses on environmental issues. Students will design interactive projects--for example, tours, games, hoe-downs, dances, podcasts, installations--that encourage the audience to experience, perform, and reimagine environmental problems and solutions.

ART 349 HUM 349 VIS 345 / The Artist at Work / Instructor: Irene Violet Small

What are the environments, fictions, fantasies, and ideologies that condition the artist at work? This course takes as its investigative locus the artist's studio, a space of experimentation and inspiration, but also of boredom, sociability, exhaustion, and critique. Structured around visits to the studios of multiple practicing artists in New York City, the course tracks the trope of “the studio” from the Renaissance to the present, with emphasis on the concept's reconfiguration and reanimation in contemporary art. Lecture with discussion and field trips.

ENG 357 / HUM 357 / URB 357 / Topics in American Literature: Mapping NYC Modernism, Lit and Art / Instructor: David M. Ball

The years 1880-1930 overturned much of the settled ground of art and literature. Cities accelerated these changes by bringing together disparate racial, ethnic, and artistic communities, nowhere more so than in New York. Through a study of multicultural literature and the arts, we will begin to map the role the city itself played in these transformative years. We will also travel to the sites that made these narratives possible--including extensive study of the holdings from our own museum collection--engaging in experiential learning about the modern period and studying the lasting aftereffects of modernism on the city in the 21st century.

FALL 2014

ARC 448 URB 448 LAS 448 LAS / Ciudades del Boom: Economic Growth, Urban Life and Architecture in the Latin American City / Instructor: Fabrizio Gallanti

The research course explores the consequences of the economic growth experienced in Latin America in the past 25 years on the social and spatial organization of cities. We will analyze how the modification of political systems and the parallel neo-liberal restructuring of economy have impacted on the production of space. Critical analysis will consider the connections between new phenomena of urban transformation, renewed social articulations and the surge of responses from the design fields. Within the general frame of a contemptuous concept as “Latin America” the research course will explore for local differentiations and particularities.