Urban Studies (URBN)

* URBN 307b / AMST 190b, Race, Class, and Gender in American CitiesLaura Barraclough

This seminar explores how racial, gender, and class inequalities have been built, sustained, and challenged in U.S. cities, with a focus on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The first part of the course examines historical processes that are especially salient for identity and inequality, such as the gendered organization of public and private space, the shifting fate of industrial work, and suburbanization. The second part of the course focuses on contemporary processes that reproduce or challenge the historical construction of urban inequality. Topics include gentrification, transit equity, environmental justice, and the relationships between public space, democracy, and community wellbeing.  SO
Th 9:25am-11:15am

* URBN 314a / ARCH 314a, History of Landscape in Western Europe and the United States: Antiquity to 1950Warren Fuermann

This course is designed as an introductory survey of the history of landscape architecture and the wider, cultivated landscape in Western Europe and the United States from the Ancient Roman period to mid-twentieth century America. Included in the lectures, presented chronologically, are the gardens of Ancient Rome, medieval Europe, the early and late Italian Renaissance, 17th century France, 18th century Britain, 19th century Britain and America with its public and national parks, and mid-twentieth century America. The course focuses each week on one of these periods, analyzes in detail iconic gardens of the period, and placse them within their historical and theoretical context.  HURP
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

* URBN 316a, Technological Innovation and the Future of the American CityNathaniel Loewentheil

Technological innovation shapes the growth of cities and the lives of their inhabitants. This course examines historical technologies that were profoundly revolutionary at their time, such as the electric light and the automobile; the demands those technologies created for new kinds of infrastructure, like our electric grid and national highway system; and how that infrastructure in turn created new forms of urban development. We focus on archetypal U.S. cities whose most significant periods of growth corresponded to different technological innovations: New York City, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, and Phoenix. With that history in mind, the second part of the course explores how emerging technologies like ride hailing, electric scooters, drones, autonomous vehicles, flying cars, and smart infrastructure will impact our urban future. This course is not open to students who previously took CSBF 370.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

* URBN 327a / ARCH 327a, Difference and the CityJustin Moore

Four hundred and odd years after colonialism and racial capitalism brought twenty and odd people from Africa to the dispossessed indigenous land that would become the United States, the structures and systems that generate inequality and white supremacy persist. Our cities and their socioeconomic and built environments continue to exemplify difference. From housing and health to mobility and monuments, cities small and large, north and south, continue to demonstrate intractable disparities. The disparate impacts made apparent by the COVID-19 pandemic and the reinvigorated and global Black Lives Matter movement demanding change are remarkable. Change, of course, is another essential indicator of difference in urban environments, exemplified by the phenomena of disinvestment or gentrification. This course explores how issues like climate change and growing income inequality intersect with politics, culture, gender equality, immigration and migration, technology, and other considerations and forms of disruption. 
T 11am-1pm

URBN 345a / ARCH 345a, Civic Art: Introduction to Urban DesignAlan Plattus

Introduction to the history, analysis, and design of the urban landscape. Principles, processes, and contemporary theories of urban design; relationships between individual buildings, groups of buildings, and their larger physical and cultural contexts. Case studies from New Haven and other world cities.  HU
W 9:30am-11:10am

* URBN 360a / ARCH 360a, Urban Lab: An Urban WorldJoyce Hsiang

Understanding the urban environment through methods of research, spatial analysis, and diverse means of representation that address historical, social, political, and environmental issues that consider design at the scale of the entire world. Through timelines, maps, diagrams, collages and film, students frame a unique spatial problem and speculate on urbanization at the global scale.  Prerequisites: For non-majors: permission of the instructor is required. For ARCH majors: ARCH 150, 200, and 280.   HU1½ Course cr
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

* URBN 382b / EVST 349b / HIST 449Jb / HSHM 449b / HUMS 446b, Critical Data Visualization: History, Theory, and PracticeBill Rankin

Critical analysis of the creation, use, and cultural meanings of data visualization, with emphasis on both the theory and the politics of visual communication. Seminar discussions include close readings of historical data graphics since the late eighteenth century and conceptual engagement with graphic semiology, ideals of objectivity and honesty, and recent approaches of feminist and participatory data design. Course assignments focus on the research, production, and workshopping of students’ own data graphics; topics include both historical and contemporary material. No prior software experience is required; tutorials are integrated into weekly meetings. Basic proficiency in standard graphics software is expected by the end of the term, with optional support for more advanced programming and mapping software.  HU
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

* URBN 400a / AFST 465a / ANTH 468a / HSHM 413a / URBN 442a, Infrastructures of Empire: Control and (In)security in the Global SouthLeslie Gross-Wyrtzen

This advanced seminar examines the role that infrastructure plays in producing uneven geographies of power historically and in the “colonial present” (Gregory 2006). After defining terms and exploring the ways that infrastructure has been conceptualized and studied, we analyze how different types of infrastructure (energy, roads, people, and so on) constitute the material and social world of empire. At the same time, infrastructure is not an uncontested arena: it often serves as a key site of political struggle or even enters the fray as an unruly actor itself, thus conditioning possibilities for anti-imperial and decolonial practice. The geographic focus of this course is the African continent, but we explore comparative cases in other regions of the majority and minority world.  SO
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

* URBN 412b / ANTH 318b / SAST 308b, Peril and Possibility in the South Asian CityKalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan

For the first time in human history, at some point in the last decade a majority of humankind became city dwellers. A fifth of these city-dwelling masses inhabit the massive and massifying megacities of the Indian sub-continent. Karachi, Dhaka, and Bombay frequently threaten to be the most populous urban centers on earth, and it may only be faith in the accuracy of government census data that defers this dubious honor. For while these cities are plugged into the global flows of people, ideas, things, and capital; such developments also bring with them anomie, alienation, dispossession, and depredations. Historical social conflicts born of a century of European colonialism and millennia of caste society have in some cases been mitigated, in others intensified in ways both insidious and invidious. Much ink has been spilt on contouring both the perils and possibilities attending the urbanization of the sub-continent. This course explores a ground-up view of the many ways in which the urban denizens of these bustling cities where pasts and futures collide, experience this collision. While this course draws on interdisciplinary scholarly examinations engaging the urban emergent, it focuses on the realm of experience, desire and affect germinating in the city. Students sample ethnography, art, speculative fiction, and film to map out the textures of this complex and mutating fabric. In doing so we chart the emergence and application of new ideas and cultures, practices and constraints, identities and conflicts in the contemporary urban landscapes.  SO
W 3:30pm-5:20pm

* URBN 442a / AFST 465a / ANTH 468a / HSHM 413a / URBN 400a, Infrastructures of Empire: Control and (In)security in the Global SouthLeslie Gross-Wyrtzen

This advanced seminar examines the role that infrastructure plays in producing uneven geographies of power historically and in the “colonial present” (Gregory 2006). After defining terms and exploring the ways that infrastructure has been conceptualized and studied, we analyze how different types of infrastructure (energy, roads, people, and so on) constitute the material and social world of empire. At the same time, infrastructure is not an uncontested arena: it often serves as a key site of political struggle or even enters the fray as an unruly actor itself, thus conditioning possibilities for anti-imperial and decolonial practice. The geographic focus of this course is the African continent, but we explore comparative cases in other regions of the majority and minority world.  SO
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

* URBN 490a / ARCH 490a, Senior Research ColloquiumKyle Dugdale

Research and writing colloquium for seniors in the Urban Studies and History, Theory, and Criticism tracks. Under guidance of the instructor and members of the Architecture faculty, students define their research proposals, shape a bibliography, improve research skills, and seek criticism of individual research agendas. Requirements include proposal drafts, comparative case study analyses, presentations to faculty, and the formation of a visual argument. Guest speakers and class trips to exhibitions, lectures, and special collections encourage use of Yale's resources.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm