schedule

Week 1 | January 4th

Introduction

Readings: –

Week 2 | January 11th
20th Century Urban Theory (The Modern City)

Readings:

Scott, James. “The High-Modernist City: An Experiment and a Critique”, in Seeing Like a State. Yale University Press: New Haven, 1998. pp. 103-14
Harvey, D. “Postmodernism in the City: Architecture and Urban Design”, in The Condition of Post-Modernity. Basil Blackwell: Cambridge, 1989. pp. 66-98
Steinbeck, John. Chapter 5 of The Grapes of Wrath. Viking Press, New York, 1939. pp. 31-39

Screening: The London Particular

Week 3 | January 18th
Networked Urbanism

Readings:

Galloway, Anne. "Intimations of Everyday Life: Ubiquitous Computing and the City." Cultural Studies Vol. 18, No. 2/3 March/May 2004. Pg. 384–408
Hill, Dan. “The Street as Platform.” City of Sound Feb. 11, 2008. http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2008/02/the-street-as-p.html
Mitchell, William J. “The Teleserviced City” in Richard T. LeGates and Frederic Stout (eds) The City Reader (3rd edition). New York: Routledge, 2003. Pg. 497-503.
Sassen, Saskia “The Impact of the New Technologies and Globalization on Cities” in Richard T. LeGates and Frederic Stout (eds) The City Reader (3rd edition). New York: Routledge, 2003. Pg. 212-220.

Screenings: sequences from Taxi Driver vs. The Departed, The Wire, Minority Report, Keiichi Matsuda’s - Augmented City 3D

Week 4 | January 27th
Negotiating the City (Automobility)

Readings:

Taylor, Nigel. “The aesthetic experience of traffic in the modern city” Urban Studies 2003, 40(8):1609-1625
Talsma, Matthew “Driver’s Ed. and Technologies of the Self” from Technologies of the City and Technologies of the Self: Lessons from the road. University of Toronto Master’s Thesis, Department of Geography, unpublished, 2010.
Dodge, M. and Kitchin, R. “The automatic management of drivers and driving spaces” Geoforum 2007 38: 264-275
De Certeau, Michel. “Walking in the City”, in The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press, 1988. pp. 91-110 (notes 219-221).

Week 5 | February 1st
Memory and the City

Readings:

Benjamin, Walter. “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century – Exposé <of 1939>” in The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1999. Pg. 14-26
Benjamin, Walter. Selections from The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1999.
Donald, James. “The City, the Cinema. Modern Spaces” in Chris Jenks (ed) Visual Culture. New York: Routledge, 1995. Pg. 77-95
Manovich, Lev. “Database as Symbolic Form” in Victoria Vesna (ed) Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Pg. 39-60.
Rossi, Aldo. “Primary Elements and the Concept of Area” in The Architecture of the City. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982. Pg. 62-102

Screening: Selections from Dark City, Man with a Movie Camera

Week 6 | February 8th
GIS, State and Society

Guest Speaker: Marcel Fortin

Readings:

Scott, James. 'Nature and Space' in Seeing Like a State. Yale University Press: New Haven, 1998. pp. 33-52
Charles, D. 'Do Maps Have Morals?' Technological Review, 2005 Pg. 77-79
Hutchinson, Alex. Global Impositioning Systems: Is GPS technology actually harming our sense of direction? The Walrus Magazine, November 2009


Week 7 | February 15th
DIY Cartography, Counter-Cartography & Sounding out the City

Guest Speaker: Tori Foster

Readings:

Butler, Toby. “A Walk of Art: The Potential of the Sound Walk as Practice in Cultural Geography”. Social & Cultural Geography 7, no. 6 (2006): 889-908.
Cosgrove, Dennis. “Carto-City” in Janet Abrams & Peter Hall (eds) Else/Where: Mapping. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Design Institute, 2006. Pg. 148-157.
Holmes, Brian. “Counter Cartographies” in Janet Abrams & Peter Hall (eds) Else/Where: Mapping. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Design Institute, 2006. Pg. 20-25.
Varnelis, Kazys and Leah Meisterlin. “The invisible city: Design in the age of intelligent maps.” Adobe Think Tank, July 15, 2008. http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/thinktank/tt_varnelis.html

Screening/demonstrations: Foursquare/WeePlaces, EveryBlock, Fuzzy Boundaries, Oakland Crimespotting, Spatial Information Design Lab

Week 8 | March 1st
Google and the Archive

Readings:

Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2008, 56-63. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/
Gibson, William. “Google’s Earth.” The New York Times, August 31, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/opinion/01gibson.html
Toobin, Jeffrey. “Google’s Moon Shot: The quest for the universal library.” The New Yorker, February 5, 2007. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/02/05/070205fa_fact_toobin
De Vries Hoogerwerff, Marijn. “Googlized Censorship Research.” Society of the Query Blog, September 21, 2009. http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/query/2009/09/21/googlized-censorship-research/

Screenings: Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village

Week 9 | March 8th
Technology and Politics

Readings:

Dean, Jodi. “Technology: The promises of communicative capitalism” in Democracy and other neoliberal fantasies: Communicative capitalism and left politics. Duke University Press, 2009. Pg. 19- 48
Castells, Manuel. "Wireless Communication and Socio-Political Mobilization: Case Studies" in The Mobile Communication Society: A cross-cultural analysis of available evidence on the social uses of wireless communication technology, 2004 Pg. 196-222
Robinson, Pamela. "City cleanup, web 2.0 style.” Spacing Magazine 19 Fall 2010, Pg. 60
Gladwell, Malcolm "Why the revolution will not be tweeted" The New Yorker 4 October, 2010 pp1-5
Cascio, Jamais 'Get Smarter' the Atlantic July/August 2009

Suggested Readings

David Lyon, “Everyday Surveillance: Personal data and social classifications.” Information, Communication & Society, 5 (2), 2002, Pg. 242-257.
Burrows, Roger and Nick Gane, "Geodemographics, software and class," Sociology, 40 (5) 2006, Pg. 293-812.


Week 10 | March 15th
The City as Gameboard

Readings:

Boron, Dariusz, Jacob. “A Short History of Digital Gamespace” in Space Time Play – Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism: The Next Level. Boston: Birkhäuser, 2007. Pg. 26-31.
Schweizer, Bobby. Representations of the City in Video Games. MA Thesis. Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, 2009.
Soja, Edward W. Ch 11: “Simcities: Restructuring the Urban Imaginary” in Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. London: Blackwell, 2000. Pg. 323-345.
Smith, Greg J. “Urban Screens: The Schematic City in Gaming and Architectural Representation.” Serial Consign July 5, 2010. http://serialconsign.com/2010/07/urban-screens-schematic-city-gaming-and-architectural-representation

Screenings/demonstrations: BERG’s Here and There, Grand Theft Auto, Civilization, Simcity

Week 11 | March 22nd
Securing the City

Readings:

Graham, Stephen. “Cities as Battlespace: the new military urbanism” City Journal 2009 13(4):383-402 Hobsbawm, E. J. Cities and Insurrections. Global Urban Development, 2005. 1(1). pp.1-8
Mitchell, D. "The End of Public Space? People’s Park, Definitions of the Public, and Democracy." Annals of the Association of American Geographers 1995 85(1) pp. 108-133
Cowen, D. and Smith, N. “Martial Law in the Streets of Toronto”:G20 Security and State Violence Human Geography 3 (3)

Suggested Readings:

Keller, Lisa. Prologue in Triumph of Order: Democracy & Public Space in New York and London. Columbia University Press, New York, 2009. Pg. 1-14

Screenings: G20 clips

Week 12 | March 29th
Redesigning Utopia

Readings:

Greenfield, Adam and Mark Shepard. “Urban Computing and its Discontents.” Situated Technologies Pamphlet (1) 2007. http://www.situatedtechnologies.net/?q=node/77