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Campus | Bryn Mawr |
Semester | Fall 2020 |
Registration ID | CITYB250001 |
Course Title | Topics: GrowthOrg of Cities |
Credit | 1.00 |
Department | Environmental Studies |
Instructor | Cohen,Jeffrey A. |
Times and Days | TF 01:10pm-02:30pm
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Room Location | |
Additional Course Info | Class Number: 2105 This is a topics course. Course content varies.; Current topic description: This course is intended as a venue for exploring the built fabric of cities over time -- observing larger scale topographies and armatures amid patterns of growth, distinctive built textures at the level of the block, and dominant building forms. Adopting an international range of examples, we will examine the effects of shaping forces and influential models, distributions of functions and populations, and purposeful ways that urban spaces have been represented, in order to learn to more effectively read the built form of cities. CITY B250 Growth & Spatial Organization of the City City 250 will be a small, highly participatory class for actively exploring physical, social, and historical patterns in cities from diverse places and cultures across the globe, and through different moments in their evolution. Rather than a series of lectures tracking the most famous examples of large-scale city planning, the course will be more of a group workshop collectively interrogating urban forms and the forces that shape them, especially in areas that we have sometimes cast as products of ‘organic’ or ‘unplanned’ growth. We’ll look at a lot of highly detailed old maps and views. Through them and current digital images, the course will examine urban spaces and built fabric closely and comparatively, tracking the evolution of selected cities from their origins to the present day. As the title implies, an initial focus will be on larger-scale morphologies and armatures that structure patterns of growth and use. Students will work from successive weekly or bi-weekly prompts to delve into the historical development of different cities, different transformative moments, and different information types, identifying pertinent resources, compiling annotated bibliographies, and reporting out findings through illustrated presentations to classmates, meant to seed discussion. Over the course of the term we will move toward looking inside these larger geographies, focusing more on distributions of economic functions and population groups, on distinctive built textures at the level of the block, and on common building forms that dominated their built urban landscape at different points in time. Proceeding through these prompted observational exercises, the course will rely substantially on the visual evidence in historical representations that record successive iterations of the city, peering at layers in an urban palimpsest that have often been disrupted or even completely erased by 20th century development. And as we observe, we will connect patterns to forces, models, and aggregated actions that have shaped parts of cities, seeking to engage with a rich literature in analytical scholarly writings and period documents that chronicle episodes and help us understand these patterns. In addition to these successive research exercises, annotated bibliographies, and discussions, there will be a research paper/project advanced in increments over the second half of the course, exploring a chosen aspect of the course’s subject in greater depth. === Approach: Inquiry into the Past (IP); Haverford: Social Science (SO) ( ) Enrollment Cap: 20; If the course exceeds the enrollment cap the following criteria will be used for the lottery: Major/Minor/Concentration; This course will invite the participation of both in-person and remotely connected students to the degree that we can make that work. The especially interactive nature of the course, with guided uses of primary materials, discussion, and student presentations to fellow students, will favor synchronous participation. All classes will be recorded through Zoom or parallel tools, so that occasional asynchronous participation can be accommodated, but fully asynchronous engagement would miss out on much of the instruction and interaction, and would be strongly discouraged. |
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