Capitalism Amer Metropolis

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Readings in this upper level seminar will be oriented around the concept of political economy of cities. We will focus on U.S. capitalism in its spatial and material form in so far as it helped create and shape U.S. cities, their prosperity and inequality. Readings, mostly focused on the 19th and 20th centuries, will enable us to look at how economic development, the state, labor, and markets gave rise to cities and their regional industries. City-making has been a product of uneven relations between the state, corporations, elites, reformers, activists, and others at different moments in time. How has the workings of American capitalism shifted in the lives of the city residents over time? What social movements have risen to address the inequities built by capitalist imperatives? How has urbanism reflected not only market power but people power? Students will write a major research paper or historiographical paper on one aspect of capitalism and the American metropolis, drawing on archival, primary, and secondary sources.