URBS 303 - Advanced Debates in Urban Studies

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

This seminar focuses on selected issues of importance in Urban Studies. Topics vary according to the instructor. The course is required of all majors and may be taken during the junior or senior years; it can be repeated for credit if the topic has changed. Lisa Brawley.

Topic for 2021/22b: Design, Disability, and the Demos: or, Critical Access Studies and the Right to the City. This seminar engages critical disability studies as a lens through which to investigate the spatial politics of urban everyday life in the contemporary United States–and to imagine the world otherwise. Through a series of readings, projects, and speculative design provocations, we examine the structures and practices that constitute ordinary urban life, and the forms of collective life they enable or disable. We interrogate the extensive network of supports–roads and bricks, pipes and wires, screens and cables, services and protocols–that produce the phantasmatic autonomy of a normative urban subject. We ask: why do only some forms of vulnerability and interdependence command the infrastructures of the commons? What does the Just City look like–and feel and sound like–when centered in the experience of non-conforming bodies and minds? Informed by recent art, activism and scholarship in critical disabilities studies, feminist and queer theory and critical urban studies, students engage the themes of the course through a series of individual and collaborative projects. Lisa Brawley.

Strongly recommended: Architectural Design, or a Studio Art course.

Prerequisite(s): URBS 100 and URBS 200 or the equivalent, and permission of the instructor.

One 3-hour period.

Course Format: CLS

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