Urban Theory UST 800

Part 1 Methods and Measures – Approaching the Urban

The logic of discovery is widely practiced, especially in this country, as the conventional mode of representing the city in academic circles as well as in professional practices dealing with urban issues. This has the advantage of creating a widely shared framework for understanding the city. At the same time it has the disadvantage of deemphasizing questions of value, frameworks and relations that generate spaces and the politics integral to even seemingly neutral representations such as maps.

Introduction: Overview of the class. Introduction of provisional ideal types as an approach to analysis. Introduction of a relational, or generative framework; the play between how the city is understood and how subjects are understood.

Mathatta by Paul Staand and Charles Sheeler 1921

Introduction of Shaft Directed by Gordon Parks 1971

Methodological Approach. Framework for approaching urban practices. The politics of prior assumptions and the taken for granted. “The Distribution of Sensible” as a heterogeneous process. The examples of the origin myth of the city and siting “extra”.

The Distribution of the Sensible: Politics and Aesthetics, Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics (New York: Continuum 2004)

Book 2 (excerpts) Plato, Republic in The Collected Dialogues of Plato Hunington Cairns and Edith Hamilton, Ed, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press 1961 ed.)

Wings of Desire (excerpt) by Wim Wenders 1990

The distribution of the sensible and analysis of urban space. Looking at a spatial analysis of urban space based on Ranciere’s theoretical framework. Introduction of the notion of dissensus

The Fear of the Banlieue, Chapter 1 and The State’s Statements: Urban Policy as Place-making Chapter 2 in The Badlands of the Republic by Mustafa Dikec (London: Blackwell 2007)

Traveling in Europe’s River of Migrants. The New York Times has embedded a team of journalists among refugees attempting to reach Northern Europe. Each entry talks about an event or events in a day at the level of the individual refugee experiencing it. The series is available on the Times website. Please read several of these and be really to discuss: Compare to urban policy in the banlieues that Dikec studies. Compare to main coverage of the migrant crisis. What is “extra” in various representations of the situation? Be specific.

Begin thinking about a possible paper topic… Due 16 Oct