STS 340 - Advanced Urban and Regional Studies

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2024/25b: Cities and the Politics of Technology. (Same as GEOG 340 and URBS 340) This seminar focuses on power and the politics of technology in modern cities. The class aims to put the contemporary urban scene of ubiquitous computing technology and data-driven forms of accumulation and decision making into critical perspective. It sketches out a history of the urban present in three main parts. The first examines how political technologies of social coordination, separation, surveillance, and planning constituted an apparatus of disciplinary power animating liberal capitalist cities. The second highlights the wartime emergence of novel techniques of control tied to computational technologies and explores how critiques of postwar urban planning figured a reconceptualization of cities as complex and self-organizing systems. The third probes the political character and social consequences of those market-based forms of technological urbanism that have taken hold in the internet era. Throughout the course of this semester, we will work to remain attuned to the ways in which technological devices, systems, and methods are simultaneously embedded within and constitutive of wider social relations and historically specific forms of power. John Elrick.

One 3-hour period.

Course Format: CLS