20th Century Cities

(4 Credits)

This course has two main purposes. First, it seeks to familiarize students with the methods and arguments central to the writing of the recent urban, suburban, and metropolitan history. Second, it aims to examine the various ways that critics, architects, planners, social scientists and others that we can lump into the category of “urbanists” have sought to know, change, and improve the urban built environment and urban social life over the course of the twentieth century, as well as the effects of their ideas as they have played out in the spaces of metropolitan America.