Hi there – if you are wondering about the detailed course content for GEOG/URPL 505 (Urban Spatial Patterns and Theories) after reading Geography’s Spring 2010 Catalogue, I have yet to develop the Spring 2010 syllabus. However, the course will be very similar to a course I taught several years ago subtitled Cities and Development. Here is an extract from the most recent syllabus:
This course examines the relationship between cities and the “development” process. Global scale assessments of urbanization processes lay the context for detailed analyses of issues such as the role of the state in the development process, the relationship between cities and citizenship, postcolonial urbanism, transnational urbanism, and city futures. While these are long-standing issues of debate in various disciplines, and in inter-disciplinary networks, our interest will be in recent work that addresses new theoretical, methodological and empirical questions, or else select “classics” that have had lasting impact.
Please note that this is a truly interdisciplinary course, and I am happily open to students registering in it from virtually any discipline. The key thing is that you love cities in all their glories and horrors. As Peter Hall (in his 1998 epic Cities and Civilization, p. 989) puts it:
Earthy utopias they were not, places of stress and conflict and sometimes actual misery they certainly were. Those who find them distasteful or disagreeable can – and will – get out of them to arcadian suburbs and garden cities; and policies should help them do so, if that is what they want. Cities were and are quite different places, places for people who can stand the heat of the kitchen: places where the adrenalin pumps through the bodies of the people and through the streets on which they walk; messy places, sordid places sometimes, but places nevertheless superbly worth living in, long to be remembered and long to be celebrated.
I would also like to reinforce that that this course is designed for students with wide-ranging geographical and historical foci. For example, lessons from all of these texts can be applied to the development and implementation of research projects in other places or historic periods. The research papers can also focus on any city-region, related development process (e.g., rural-urban migration), or theoretical or methodological approach.
The course will be book-centred (i.e. it helps to like reading books), and we’ll be engaging with the theme of comparative urban studies this coming term. Please note that the course is formally scheduled like this:
W 7:45-9:40 am, 388 Science Hall
Credits: 3 Breadth: S Level: A Cross-listed: URPL
Prereq.: Junior standing
Let me know if you have any queries (and yes, feel free to bring along food and coffee if you wish!). And watch this space…
Kris Olds
