How Cities Work

3-0-9 units · Graduate

Historical and theoretical introduction to the basic mechanisms that govern the making and working of cities. Through case studies showing the evolution of these features across the world, successive weeks take seminar participants through the functional elements that make up a city: economic base (entrepots, industry, services, markets, and so on); interest groups; the making of land markets; legal statutes as to property and jurisdiction; the basis of authority; rent gradients (their invention and spread across the world); the political economy of transportation and logistics; fiscal structure and revenue (including zoning); the provenance of projects; security (police, fire and hygiene risks); and the institutional economics of (biopolitical) provision (housing, utilities, schooling, etc.). Designed to equip students with a technical grammar to understand how cities work.