Urbanization (URBAN-UH)

As Abu Dhabi strives to position itself as a global capital city, it is embarked on ambitious plans for urban, economic and social development. Since 2007, Plan Capital 2030 laid the foundation for a new vision with sustainability as an overarching principle. The course will introduce a full understanding of the evolution of the city, its planning history, critically examine Abu Dhabi current plans and their progress, and identify the main urban actors and the forces shaping the growth of the City. Through reading key texts in urban theories, site visits, walking tours, guest speakers, presentations and debates, students will be able to understand the complexity of city planning and development in rapidly developing cities and key challenges in comparison to other regional and global examples.

This course provides an introduction to key themes in urban studies, focusing on a selected set of issues that are particularly relevant for New York City but important for cities throughout the world. Students will read classic and important contemporary works, including selections from great books in urban scholarship whose significance transcends any one discipline. This course will include readings from authors such as Weber, Jacobs, Ballon, Mumford, Simmel, Sennett, Wirth, Jackson, and Sassen, as well as several case studies of emerging issues, particularly questions regarding climate change mitigation and adaptation, sustainable development, and urban inequality. This course culminates with an intensive study of how New York City can respond to the challenges posed by climate change.

This course is an introduction to the role of urban design in global sustainability. The first step is to understand how cities affect climate and how climate affects cities by examining New York as a model. New York is a coastal city faced with the simultaneous requirement to grow its population by a million people yet to improve the quality of its civic life when climate events threaten both its urban fabric and critical infrastructure. How New York uses urban design not just to survive but to thrive is the subject of this course. This course will introduce the people, products and processes of urban design. The city itself will frequently serve as classroom, with students exploring and recording examples of urban design through the neighborhoods they transform.

Shanghai has evolved markedly through key stages in the history of urban form, vestiges of which are found within the city today: an old walled "Chinese city"; tree-lined boulevards and commercial avenues of 19th and 20th century foreign settlements; and suburban development in Pudong. This class examines each key stage, combining readings with in situ urban inquiry. Readings in this course cover Chinese reflections on the city in general and Shanghai in particular, as well as urban studies classics like Lewis Mumford's The Culture of Cities. Trips take students to historically significant cultural spaces, including the old City God Temple, Fuzhou Road Bookshops, alleyway houses, The Peace Hotel, the Great World amusement park, People's Park, the Moganshan Road contemporary art complex, as well as nearby waterway towns that illustrate aspects of Shanghai's history before urbanization.

Public spaces play an essential role in the life of cities and their residents. Public squares and parks, streets and esplanades-these are often the signature spaces that constitute a city's distinctive identity. They are also the settings of everyday life, mixing bowls where a city's diverse communities interact, forums for individual as well as collective action and expression. This course explores the nature of public space in cities around the world, with attention to their physical character and design, their history, their pictorial and literary representation, and the political and social practices that activate public space. This course will explore three overarching questions. What do we mean by "public" and "public space"? What are common characteristics of public spaces and how do people use them? And why are public spaces important to city life? In addition to historical and contemporary squares and streetscapes of Europe and the Middle East, the course will draw upon case studies in Sydney as well as the hometowns of the students.

This course explores the ways that class, race, ethnicity, and religious difference have shaped modern western cities, with attention to the spatialization of inequality in London and the British Empire. This course is interdisciplinary, bridging past and present and combining historical and social scientific approaches to urban change. We will explore patterns of segregation and residence, the history and geography of difference, and political economy. We will discuss the role that planners, architects, investors, activists, and policymakers have played in shaping metropolitan areas over the last century, with attention to key policy debates, and planning and policy interventions involving immigration, urban redevelopment, gentrification, community control, and suburbanization.

We examine contemporary cities as transnational, subject to influences coming from distant places while generating their own extra-national impacts. We take our primary cases, Abu Dhabi and Dubai, as extreme but not exceptional in these (and other) regards. Great wealth and distinctive modes of migration, resource use, and citizenship make processes more evident that are generally occurring across the globe. So, the Gulf is a "lab." Our strategy will be to focus, in particular, on buildings and public space - architecture and infrastructure - to shed light on larger social, economic, and cultural dynamics. The goal will be to understand and compare "travel" among the urban components as they mix up, hybridize, or conflict. With continuous attention to environmental impacts - in both "sending" and "receiving" locations - we will look for prospects that might reform production, consumption, and transit. In taking up events and processes in the UAE, will be comparing them to parallel dynamics in other cities, particularly the origin-places of participating students.