505 tomorrow

Hi there.

I look forward to seeing you tomorrow morning at 8:00 am.  I’ll try and be in the Geog main office (Room 160) at ~ 7:45 am in the chance your reviews need to be copied.  IF you can copy your own reviews before-hand, please do so as to limit any potential chaos tomorrow.  Please bring along 20 copies and remember to put your names on the reviews!  It is also better to have back-to-back on one piece of paper should you need two full pages.

As noted two weeks ago, your book review must deal with the entire Abu-Lughod book.

And, as noted in the syllabus (extract below), your abstracts are due tomorrow as well:

Research Paper (50% of grade)

The remaining 50% of your grade is derived from a research paper on the topic off your choice (subject to my approval). The paper should be on a theme related to ‘cities and development’. I would like you to prepare this paper with the aim of submitting it to a professional journal that published urban-oriented work (e.g., Cities, Development and Change, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, Urban Geography, Urban Studies).

In terms of length:

• Undergraduates should aim for a 15-20 page double-spaced paper.
• Graduate students should aim for a 25-30 page double-spaced paper.

In terms of deadlines, note that in the schedule I stated:

• Week 4: February 10 – Research paper topic titles and 50 word abstracts due in class today
• Week 8: March 10 – Research paper title, full single-spaced page abstract, and reference list (10+ key academic references) due in class today
• Tuesday May 11 – The final version of the research paper is due by 5:00 pm

If you have more than one option in mind, please bring me two abstracts and titles on one piece of paper. I’ll use these as a basis to give you some feedback on topics, direction, sources, and so on.

Cheers,  Kris

Chinatown(s)

Thanks for making to Chinatown this morning…I’m eager to hear what you have to say about it next week when we discuss Abu-Lughod II.

Needless to say representations of Chinatown offer rich pickings for urbanists – see, for example, Kay Anderson’s now classic book Vancouver’s Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875-1980 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991).  In addition, Chinatowns all over the world are in constant motion, albeit down varying paths…see this video, for example, from the other night in Vancouver’s Chinatown:

Also see: http://www.gunghaggisfatchoy.com/

The city is indeed a restless and fascinating place…

Going to Chinatown tomorrow morning…

Here is the Chinatown handout.  See you at 7:30 am sharp (argggg….my apologies) tomorrow morning at Rm 254, Van Hise Hall (link here for the campus map if you need to locate the building).  Feel free to bring along tea/coffee, etc.

Kris

The City of the Future [Shanghai] Echoes the Past

Beijing burnished its international reputation with a handful of acclaimed icons built for the Olympics. But Shanghai is still the Chinese city that appeals most to foreigners, thanks to its checkered past, colonial architecture and mercantile drive—qualities that don’t need translating for most Westerners…

Read the rest of the WSJ article here.

K

Interesting interview with Mike Davis

Part I

Part II

Final version of Spring 2010 course syllabus

Hi there – here is the new Spring 2010 syllabus in PDF format – the one with all books sourced and guaranteed available via Rainbow.  Let me know if you have any problems downloading and/or reading the file.

Look forward to meeting you next Wed at 8:00 am…and feel free to bring along coffee/tea (I’ll bring the Greenbush Bakery donuts!).

Kris

Wondering about the course content?!

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