Invisible Cities

3 units

This graduate and advanced undergraduate seminar takes as a point of departure the famous 1972 Italo Calvino text that reframes a single city (Venice) as multiple cities, told through a sequence of discrete narratives and descriptions. Each of Calvino's Invisible 'cities' reflect different emotional and physical environments and possibilities-or impossibilities-for their inhabitants, yet are all still connected through an overarching narrative. Invisible\Cities, the course, builds on this premise that a city is not a one-size-fits-all experience (nor a monolithic construct with a uniform constituency), but instead is comprised of radically different environments all selectively accessed, depending on one's positionality or relationship to urban redevelopment processes. In places like St. Louis - but in fact in all American cities - residents live out different urban realities or imaginaries, with unequal access to the same services, provisions and processes. A highly visible instance of this occurs along Delmar Blvd in St. Louis where two contrasting lived experiences play out in neighborhoods across from each other on the north-south divide. However, this class posits that much less visible instances of the duplicitous city also exist, in spaces not geographically divided, but (more insidiously) overlaid. The course will focus on this conceptualization of inequality where both privileged and underserved populations co-exist in much more intertwined ways. Within any given block, neighbors live according to different opportunities, for education, health access, police services, or routes to property acquisition and financing. These are the invisible, spatially simultaneous cities; the urban realities that are much harder to see-at least to those who do not live those realities on a day-to-day basis. Like in Calvino's world, urban and lived space is endlessly continuous and accessible for some; for others it is fragmented, even disorienting or opaque. This course will examine, frame, collect and document the various manifestations of invisibility together with the political instruments and policies that produce-and reproduce-it. We will use the St. Louis region as our primary focus, with comparisons to other sites. Our studies will involve a close re/reading of many of the mechanisms of daily governance and urban design such as policies, planning tools, legal, financial and real estate protocols and of course design decisions and processes; ie the apparatuses of urban redevelopment that exist right before our eyes. The seminar welcomes both graduate students and advanced undergraduate students from across disciplines. Support for Invisible\Cities is provided by the Washington University in St. Louis Ferguson Academic Seed Grant Program granted through the Offices of the Chancellor and Provost and the Olin Business School. Fulfills Urban Issues and MUD Track elective requirement.