Course Syllabus

 

Harvard Extension School

HARC E-178: Designing the American City: Civic Aspirations and Urban Form

 

Professor Alex Krieger

Spring 2016

The class is filmed on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 1:00pm – Gund Hall, Room 111

 

Online Option for Extension School students: the class is available to watch online.  You can watch the lectures “on demand” via the course website at time that is convenient for you.  However, we recommend that you watch the two weekly lectures on a timely basis in order to keep up with the progress of the course.

 

 

Class TA:  Ben Bolger

Email:  bolger at post.harvard.edu (use the @ symbol in place of the at when emailing Ben)

Please direct all administrative questions to Ben.  He has been with the course for many years and is very knowledge.  He will provide you with a prompt and timely response to your questions.

 

 

Course Description

The course is an interpretative look at the characteristic patterns of settlement and attitudes towards cities and urban life that are identified with American urbanization. It introduces the American city as a culturally meaningful form and presents a body of historical and social material relevant to its study. The course seeks to foster a critical understanding of the cultural processes, policies, planning and design actions, which have influenced American urbanization, while introducing the visual and analytic skills necessary for its interpretation.

 

The course chronicles the “love-hate” attitude that Americans have shown toward their cities across history, evident in both utopian and pragmatic efforts to reconceive how and in what shape cities and urban regions should grow. While not abandoning long-standing precedents of urban organization, Americans have consistently sought alternative ways to form communities. This search for alternatives originally proceeded in concert with a body of ideals that became fundamental to the European Enlightenment, and soon after to the explosion of urban growth brought about by the Industrial Revolution.  Just being conceived, rather than as the European cities needing to adapt (with considerable difficulty) to the cultural, political and technological transformations of the 17th through the 20th centuries, American cities heralded the arrival of the modern world. This is key to their appreciation.

 

The course also seeks analogies, comparisons and contrasts between urban growth during the periods of rapid American urbanization, and the even more rapid urban growth currently taking place in many regions of the world.  American cities grew largely in emulation off and contrast with their much older European counterparts. So do today many cities globally seek inspiration from and attempt to improve upon the American urban experience.

 

Readings

Readings will be drawn from the following books, which are available for purchase at the COOP.

 

• Jackson, Kenneth. Crabgrass Frontier. Oxford University Press, 1985
• Johnson, Steven. The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic and How It Changed Modern Science, Cities and the Modern World. Riverhead Books 2006
• Mackin, Anne. Americans and Their Land, University of Michigan Press, 2006
• Waldie, D.J. Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir. St Martin’s Griffin, 1996

 

Additional required readings will be available through the course site and course reader. The recommended readings are listed to expand upon the themes of a particular lecture topic, and to facilitate an individual student’s research interests.

 

All of the required readings and some of the recommended readings will be available on reserve at both the Lamont Library and the Loeb Library in Gund Hall.

 

If you do not live near Cambridge, MA, we will provide you with accessible online options.

 

 

Sections for Extension School students

An optional online discussion forum will be run by Course TA Ben Bolger.  More information about this option will be emailed to you during the first week of the course. 

 

The online sections are designed to help you with any questions you have about the lectures, readings, or related questions that you have about the course topics.  They are designed to be a friendly and supportive learning environment.

 

We will also hold several live sessions with Professor Alex Krieger (and TA Ben Bolger) where students will be able to ask questions via email, live chat, or Skype and the answers will be streamed live over the course website.  These sessions will be scheduled at convenient times for working/professional students.

 

 

Requirements

Students for the course will be asked to complete 3 papers.  Undergraduate students will be asked to complete two 5-7 page papers worth 25% each, an abstract/proposal of a final research paper worth 5%, and a 10-12 page research paper worth 45% of the final course grade.  Graduate students will have the same requirements expect the final research paper must be 15-20 pages in length. More information about the specific nature of the assignments will be emailed to students later in the semester.

 

The due dates for the assignments are as follows:

Paper 1: March 10, 2016 at 11:59pm EST

Paper 2: April 14, 2016 at 11:59pm EST

Abstract of research paper: May 2, 2016 at 11:59pm EST

Research Paper: May 9, 2016 at 11:59pm EST

Late papers will be penalized.

 

Students must email their assignments to the Course TA Ben Bolger (and not Professor Krieger).  When emailing the Course TA with your assignment, please use the following format:

1) The subject heading of your email should read: “HARC E-178: Paper Assignment 1/2/3”

2) Save the file name of you submission as your last name.  Example: “smith.doc”

3) Submit your paper as a Word doc or docx file or as a PDF file.

 

The Course TA will reply to all emails within 24 hours.  If you do not receive a reply to an email within 24 hours, please re-email the Course TA.

 

Introductions: Becoming an Urban Species                                                                

 

Week 1:           1/26     Our Increasingly Urbanizing World

 

                        1/28     Cities in the American Experience

 

Anne Mackin:  Americans & Their Land, pp. 7-36.

Jean-Paul Sartre: “American Cities,” pp. 197-206.

“Cities: Smarter, Greener, Better” pp. 39-64 & 84-89, Special Issue of Scientific American, September 2011.

 

Recommended: Steven Conn, Americans Against the City: Anti-Urbanism in the 20^th Century; Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier; Alan Ehrenhalt, The Great Inversion: and the Future of the American City; Howard P. Chudacoff & Peter C. Baldwin, Editors, Major Documents in American Urban and Suburban History; Jean Baudrillard: America, Translated by Chris Turner, especially “Utopia Achieved,” pp. 75-105; Leo Hollis, Cities are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis.

 

Partitioning the Land / Aspiring to an Egalitarian Landscape                                                

 

Week 2:           2/2       Savannah: The Gridiron & Garden as Master Symbols

 

2/4       Thomas Jefferson's Cities: The Urbane Visions of an Agrarian Philosopher

 

John Reps: The Making of Urban America, chapter 7, pp. 175-203; & parts of Chapter 11, pp. 314-324.

Thomas Jefferson: Query XIX from Notes on the State of Virginia, pp. 156-158.

Garry Wills: Mr. Jefferson’s University, National Geographic, 2002. pp. 3-17.

           

Recommended: Hillary Ballon, Ed. The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan 1811-2011; Leo Marx: The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. (esp. Chapter 3: The Garden, pp. 73-144); SKIM William, H. Adams, ed.: The Eye of Thomas Jefferson (esp. 221-351); Thomas J. Campanella, The Republic of Shade: New England and the American; Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution.

 

 

Week 3:           2/9       The Small Town as an Ideal: From Puritan Covenants to

Disney’s Celebration, Florida

 

2/11      Echoes of the Frontier Hypothesis: ‘Edge Cities,’ ‘shrinking cities’ and the Plight of Detroit

 

9. B. Jackson: “Jefferson, Thoreau and After,” pp. 1-9.

Mackin: Chapter 6, pp. 73-87.

Frederick J. Turner: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” pp. 1-38.

Joel Garreau: Edge Cities: Life on the New Frontier, pp. 3-15 & 463-471

Adam Davidson, Empire of the In-Between: The Death and Life of the Industrial Corridor Linking New York & Washington, New York Times Magazine, 4 November 2012, pp. 26-35;

Anne Wyatt, Lessons From Celebration; Reconciling the Fantasy and the Reality – and Moving Forward, Planning, October 2012, pp. 39-41. 

 

Recommended: Brook Thomas, “Frederick Jackson Turner, Jose Marti and Finding a Home on the Range,” in Jose Marti’s Our America: From National Hemispheric Culture Studies, eds. Jeffrey Belnap & Raul Fernandez pp.275-291; David Maraniss, Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story; Scott Martelle, Detroit: a Biography; John Reps, The Making of Urban America, chapter 16 and pp. 439-474; David Handlin: The American Home: Architecture and Society, 1815-1915, (esp. Chapter 2: The Home Town, pp. 89-166); Henry Nash Smith: Virgin Land: The American West as a Symbol and Myth (especially pp. 3-14. 123-210, 250-262). Charlie LeDuff, Detroit an Autopsy;

 

 

Week 4:           2/16     The Company Town: Industrial (& Corporate) Experiments in the

                                    Garden

 

2/18     Making Nature Urbane: Olmsted, the Parks Movement and Today’s Equivalents

 

Richard E. Foglesong: Planning the Capitalist City: the Colonial Era to the 1920s. Princeton University Press, 1986; pp. 89-123.

Louis A. Mozingo: ''Global Pastoral Capitalism,'' Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes, pp. 195-223

Frederick Law Olmsted: “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns,” 5-75.

 

Recommended: Thomas Bender: Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas & Institutions in 19^th Century America. pp. 53-128; John Reps, Making of Urban America chapters 12 & 16; Witold Rybczynski: A Clearing in the Distance, Frederick Law Olmsted & America in the Nineteenth Century; Justin Martin, Genius of Place: The Life of Frederick Law Olmsted; Julia, Czerniak & George Hargreaves, Editors: Large Parks; Francis R. Kowski, The Best Planned City in the World: Olmsted, Vaux, and the Buffalo Park System.

 

 

America’s First Urban Age & Comparisons to Today               ______________       

 

Week 5:           2/23     The Era of the City Beautiful & the 1893 World's Columbian

 Exposition

 

2/25     Reformers and Utopians in an Urbanizing Nation

 

Mackin; Chapter 8, pp. 103-113.

Montgomery Schuyler: “Last Words About the Fair,” pp. 556-574.

Steven Johnson: The Ghost Map, entire book.

 

Recommended: Richard G. Wilson: The American Renaissance, 1876-1917, pp. 11-61; Jacob Riis: How the Other Half Lives, (1890); Eric Larson: The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America; Peter Hall: Cities of Tomorrow. Blackwell, 2001 (esp. Chapter 2: The City of Dreadful Night, pp. 13-46); Susan Marie Wirka. “The Social Movement” in Planning the Twentieth Century American City, Mary Corbin Sies and Christopher Silver, editors; Thomas Hughes, “Edison’s System Abroad: Technology Transfer,” in Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930, pp. 47-79.

 

 

Week 6:           3/1       Washington DC: The Evolution of the Nation’s Capital

 

3/3        The Archetypal Boomtown: Chicago and the Assembly of the Elements of the Modern City

 

John Reps: Monumental Washington, Princeton, 1967. pp. 1-25.

86. B. Jackson: “Chicago,” pp. 72-86.

Donald L. Miller: ”The Astonishing Chicago,” City of the Century, pp. 179-197.

Gary Wills:  “Chicago Underground” New York Review of Books, Oct. 21, 1993, pp.15-22.

Thomas J. Campanella, “The Urbanism of Ambition,” in The Concrete Dragon: China’s Revolution and What it Means for the World (Princeton Architecture Press 2008) pp. 13-25

ON RESERVE: Daniel H. Burnham and Edward Bennett: Plan of Chicago, (1909) [SKIM THE VOLUME]

 

Recommended: Michael Bednar: L’Enfant’s Legacy: Public Open Spaces in Washington, D.C; SKIM John Reps: Washington on View: The Nation’s Capital Since 1790; William Cronin: Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West; Carl Smith: The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of an American City; Thomas L. Dyja, The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream; David Headon, The Symbolic Role of the Nation’s Capital; Michael Bednar, L’Enfant’s Legacy: Public Open Spaces in Washington, D.C.;

 

 

Suburb… Suburbia… Sprawl… and Current Reactions                                                           

 

Week 7:           3/18     Garden Cities of Yesterday: The Romance of the Suburb

 

3/10     NO CLASS

 

Kenneth Jackson: Crabgrass Frontier, chapters 1-6.

Lewis Mumford: “The Fourth Migration,” and “Regions to Live In,” pp. 130-133; 151-152.

 

Recommended: Susan L. Klaus: A Modern Arcadia: Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and the Plan for Forest Hills Gardens; Robert Stern: “La Ville Bourgeoise” in The Anglo-American Suburb, a special issue of Architectural Design, 1981 and skim the remainder of the journal devoted to The Anglo-American Suburb; Jackson: Crabgrass Frontier, pp. 116-189; Leigh Gallagher: The End of the Suburbs: Where The American Dream is Moving; Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design.

 

 

SPRING BREAK

           

 

Week 8                        3/22     An Urban Civilization Without Cites: Frank Lloyd Wrights’

                                       Broadacre City

 

                        3/24     Disaggregated Urbanism: Los Angeles as a Paradigm

 

Frank Lloyd Wright: "Broadacre City: A New Community Plan," pp. 243-254.

D.J. Waldie: Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, whole book.

Mackin: Chapter 14, pp.172-187.

           

Recommended: Alex Krieger, “The Kind of Problem an Urban Region is Early in the 21^st Century”, Harvard Design Magazine 37, 2014.  Reyner Banham: Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies; Mike Davis: “Fortress LA” in Variations on a Theme Park; pp. 154-180;  Margaret Crawford: “The World in a Shopping Mall”, Edward Soja: “Inside Exopolis: Scenes from Orange County,” Langdon Winner: “Silicon Valley Mystery House. all in Michael Sorkin, ed. Variations on a Theme Park.

 

 

Week 9:           3/29     Learning From Las Vegas: Sprawling Peripheries/Themed Centers

 

                        3/31     Campaigns for ‘Smart Growth’ & Environmental Stewardship

 

Dave Hickey: “Dialectical Utopias: On Santa Fe and Las Vegas,” pp. 8-13.

Mike Davis: “The Strip vs. Nature” in Ramesh Kumar, ed. Metropolis Now, pp. 100-110.

Mark Z. Jacobson & Mark A. Delucchi, “A Path to Sustainable Energy by 2030” in Scientific American, November 2009, pp.58-65.

Alex Krieger: “The Costs – Or Have There Been Benefits, Too? - of Sprawl” Harvard Design Magazine, 2003-2004 Fall-Winter, pp. 50-55.

Daniel Brook: A History of Future Cities (New York, Norton, 2013) pp. 351-387

 

CLASS HANDOUT: “The Charter of the New Urbanism”

 

Recommended: Bruce Katz & Jennifer Bradley: “Divided We Sprawl” The Atlantic Monthly, December 1999, pp. 26-41; Pierce Lewis: The Galactic Metropolis; Salley Denton and Roger Morris: The Money and The Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, 1947-2000;  Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck: Suburban Nation: the Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream; J. Robertson, Alex Krieger: two essays in The Seaside Debates: A Critique of the New Urbanism, pp. 43-58; Richard T. Forman: “Regions & Mosaics” in Urban Regions: Ecology and Planning Beyond the City;  Ellen Dunham-Jones & Elizabeth Williamson, Retroffting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs; Mohsen Mostafavi & Gareth Doherty, editors, Ecological Urbansim; Charles Waldheim, editor, Landscape Urbanism.

 

 

Managing the Modern Metropolis                                                                               

 

Week 10:         4/5       Zoning: Regulating Urban Form & Development

 

4/7       Vertical Cities:  The Skyscraper as ‘Building Block’ of the Modern City

 

Flavel Shurtleff: “Use of the Police Power in the Execution of a City Plan,” pp. 138-167.

Michael Kwartler: “Regulating the Good that You Can’t Think Of,” pp. 13-21.

William Saunders, “High-Rise Fever, Architects Gone Wild, Instant Cities…” p.3 and Peter Buchanan: “The Tower: Anachronism Awaiting Rebirth?” in Harvard Design Magazine, Spring/Summer 2007, pp. 5-14.

Kevin Hartnett, “Zoning vs. America”, Boston Globe 13 January 2013, p. k2.

 

Recommended: Paul Goldberger: The Skyscraper, 1988. Especially “The Skyscraper vs. the City,” “Chicago Beginnings,” and “New York as Theater,” pp. 3-47;  Rutherford H. Platt: Land Use and Society: Geography, Law and Public Policy. Revised Edition, Chapter 6: “The Polarized Metropolis: 1945-2000,” pp. 177-206; Manfredo Tafuri: “The Disenchanted Mountain,” in The American City: From the Civil War to the New Deal. MIT Press, 1983, pp. 389-527; Alejandro Zaera-Polo: “High Rise Phylum 2007,” Harvard Design Magazine, pp. 15-29; William A. Fischel, Zoning Rules: The Economics of Land Use Regulation; Jeff Benedict, Little Oink House: A True Story of Defiance and Courage.

 

 

Week 11:         4/12     Robert Moses, New York and the City as Infrastructure

 

4/14     New Orleans: The Fragility of Infrastructure  

 

Marshall Berman: All That is Solid Melts Into Air, pp. 290-312.

Marta Gutman, “Equipping the Public Realm,” in Robert Moses and the Modern City; Transformation of New York, eds. Hillary Ballon & Kenneth T. Jackson, (Norton & Company 2007) pp. 72-85.

Craig E. Colten: An Unnatural Metropolis: Wrestling New Orleans From Nature; pp. 1-46.

Joel Garreau: “A Sad Truth: Cities Aren’t Forever” Washington Post, Sept. 11, 2005.

 

Recommended: The other chapters in Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York; Robert A. Caro, Robert Moses and the Fall of New York; Antony Flint, Wrestling With Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City; Thomas J. Campanella; “Urban Resilience and the Recovery of New Orleans” JAPA Vol.72, No. 2, Spring 2006; John M Barry: Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America; Douglas Brinkley: The Great Deluge; Richard Campanella: Time & Place in New Orleans: Past Geographies in the Present Day; Tom Lewis: Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways and Transforming American Life.

 

 

Week 12          4/19     Homes vs. Housing: The Public Role in Housing Americans

           

                        4/21     Urban Renewal: From Reconstruction to Preservation

 

1. Jackson: Crabgrass Frontier, pp. 190-245

Mackin: Chapter 10, pp.123-134

Louis Wirth: “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 44, 1938, pp. 190-197

Jane Jacobs: The Death and Life of Great American Cities, pp. 200-221.

Raymond Mohl, “Planned Destruction: the Interstates and Central City Housing,” in From Tenements to the Taylor Homes: In Search of an Urban Housing Policy in 20^th Century America, pp. 226-245.

 

Recommended: Herbert Gans: The Urban Villagers; Douglas W. Rae: City: Urbanism and its End, (esp. pp, 312-360); Jacobs, The Death and Life, pp. 143-269;  H. Peter Oberlander and Eva Newbrun: Houser: The Life and Work of Catherine Bauer; Gwendolyn Wright: Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America, esp. pp. 220-239.

 

 

American (& Global) Urbanization Today: Concerns and Prospects______________________

 

Week 13          4/26     Triumphs(& Tribulation) of Worldwide Urbanization            

 

Mackin: Chapter 11, pp. 135-143       

Alex Krieger: “An Urban Revival for a Suburban Culture,” pp. 42-50.

Robert Fishman: “The Fifth Migration” JAPA Vol.71, No. 4, Autumn 2005, pp. 357-366.     

Robert Neuwirth: Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World. (London, Routledge, 2006) pp. 1-22.

 

Recommended: Mark Gillen, “Pax Americana: The New Empire” in America Town: Building the Outposts of Empire, pp. 73-119;  Setha Low: Behind the Gates: Life, Security and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America, chapter 1: “Unlocking the Gated Community”; Alison Eisenberg, Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made it;  Robert Geddes, ed. Cities in Our Future; Mike Davis, Planet of Slums; Li Zhang, In Search of Paradise: Middle-class Living in a Chinese Metropolis; Gerrit Knaap & Xinghuo Zhao, “Smart Growth and Urbanization in China: Can an American Tonic Treat the Growing Pains of Asia?” in Yan Song & Chengri Ding, eds. Smart Urban Growth in China; Witold Rybczynski, Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities; Daniel Brook. A History of Future Cities.