Courses
URBN 200: Scales of Design
Professor: Bimal Mendis
Location: RDH HASTINGS
Exploration of architecture and urbanism at multiple scales from the human to the world. Consideration of how design influences and shapes the material and conceptual spheres through four distinct subjects: the human, the building, the city, and the world. Examination of the role of architects, as designers, in constructing and shaping the inhabited and urban world. Lectures, readings, reviews and four assignments that address the spatial and visual ramifications of design.
Not open to first-year students.
URBN 280: American Architecture and Urbanism
Insturctor: Elihu Rubin
Location: YUAG AUD
Introduction to the study of buildings, architects, architectural styles, and urban landscapes, viewed in their economic, political, social, and cultural contexts, from precolonial times to the present. Topics include: public and private investment in the built environment; the history of housing in America; the organization of architectural practice; race, gender, ethnicity and the right to the city; the social and political nature of city building; and the transnational nature of American architecture.
URBN 341: Globalization Space
Professor: Keller Easterling
Location: LC 102
Also listed as: ARCH 341, GLBL 253, LAST 318
Infrastructure space as a primary medium of change in global polity. Networks of trade, energy, communication, transportation, spatial products, finance, management, and labor, as well as new strains of political opportunity that reside within their spatial disposition. Case studies include free zones and automated ports around the world, satellite urbanism in South Asia, high-speed rail in Japan and the Middle East, agripoles in southern Spain, fiber optic submarine cable in East Africa, spatial products of tourism in North Korea, and management platforms of the International Organization for Standardization.
URBN 345: Civic Art: Introduction to Urban Design
Professor: Alan Plattus
Location: RDH HASTINGS
Also listed as: ARCH 345
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.
URBN 385: New Haven & the American City
Professor: Elihu Rubin, Alan Plattus
Location: SSS 114
Also listed as: AMST 198, PLSC 279, ARCH 385, HIST 152, SOCY 149
What do such disparate cities as New Delhi, Jakarta, Mexico City, and Phoenix all have in common? In short, each city relies on a fantastic technology that few people know anything about but has transformed the shape and life of cities and their hinterlands: the tubewell. Technologies for drawing up groundwater, tubewells are used in places where municipal water supply is non-existent, unreliable, or often polluted. A minor technology with a global reach, the tubewell is to the city what the elevator was to the skyscraper in the booming American metropolis of the early twentieth century. In this course we look at how tubewells and other decentralized technologies have radically transformed urban and agricultural spaces across the globe since the nineteenth century to the present. We watch how people exult before these technologies; we witness how governments and philanthropies as well as farmers and townspeople appropriate them for radically different ends. And we consider why.
AMST 196: Race, Class & Gender in American Cities
Professor: Laura Barraclough
Location: SSS 114
Also listed as: AFAM 196, ER&M 226, SOCY 190
What do such disparate cities as New Delhi, Jakarta, Mexico City, and Phoenix all have in common? In short, each city relies on a fantastic technology that few people know anything about but has transformed the shape and life of cities and their hinterlands: the tubewell. Technologies for drawing up groundwater, tubewells are used in places where municipal water supply is non-existent, unreliable, or often polluted. A minor technology with a global reach, the tubewell is to the city what the elevator was to the skyscraper in the booming American metropolis of the early twentieth century. In this course we look at how tubewells and other decentralized technologies have radically transformed urban and agricultural spaces across the globe since the nineteenth century to the present. We watch how people exult before these technologies; we witness how governments and philanthropies as well as farmers and townspeople appropriate them for radically different ends. And we consider why.
ANTH 414: Hubs, Mobilities, and World Cities
Professor: Helen Siu
Location: SA10 105
Also listed as: EAST 417 & 575, ANTH 575
Analysis of urban life in historical and contemporary societies. Topics include capitalist and postmodern transformations; class, gender, ethnicity, and migration; and global landscapes of power and citizenship.
EVST 226: Global Environmental History
Professor: Harvey Weiss
Location: KRN 321
Also listed as: ARCH 324, F&ES 873
The dynamic relationship between environmental and social forces from the Pleistocene glaciations to the Anthropocene present. Pleistocene extinctions; transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture; origins of cities, states, and civilization; adaptations and collapses of Old and New World civilizations in the face of climate disasters; the destruction and reconstruction of the New World by the Old. Focus on issues of adaptation, resilience, and sustainability, including forces that caused long-term societal change.
HSHM 211: Global Catastrophe since 1750
Professor: Bill Rankin
Location: WLH 119
A history of the geological, atmospheric, and environmental sciences, with a focus on predictions of global catastrophe. Topics range from headline catastrophes such as global warming, ozone depletion, and nuclear winter to historical debates about the age of the Earth, the nature of fossils, and the management of natural resources. Tensions between science and religion; the role of science in government; environmental economics; the politics of prediction, modeling, and incomplete evidence.
Cross-listed as: EVST 211, G&G 211, HSHM 211.
URBN 160: Introduction to Urban Studies
An introduction to key topics, research methods, and practices in urban studies, an interdisciplinary field of inquiry and action rooted in the experience of cities. As physical artifacts, the advent of large cities have reflected rapid industrialization and advanced capitalism. They are inseparable from the organization of economic life; the flourishing of cultures; and the formation of identities. They are also places where power is concentrated and inequalities are (re)produced. Debates around equity are filtered through urban environments, where struggles over jobs, housing, education, mobility, public health, and public safety are front and center. Course organized as a colloquium with numerous guests. Accessible entirely online, there will also be live, in-person events, with social distancing and face masks/shields, available to students in New Haven.