2016-2017 Academic Catalog 
    
    Mar 28, 2024  
2016-2017 Academic Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

GEOG 356 - Utopian Visions, Urban Realities: Planning Cities for the 21st Century


Although utopia literally means “no place” and utopias do not exist in any concrete sense, utopian thinking exerts a powerful hold on our imagination and continues to inspire a lot of approaches to urban policy, design and planning today. This course explores this thinking and will attempt to come to grips with various ideas about what utopias should be, how they have animated our thinking about city form and function, and how they have achieved certain material expressions in the twentieth-century urban context. It will also examine the contradictions and unintended consequences of utopian thinking in planning. Amongst other things, the course will grapple with questions of order versus disorder in the city, heterogeneity versus homogeneity, openness versus closure, and individual freedom versus collective necessity. It will draw upon geographical sources as well as a diverse array of other materials. Open to doctoral students only.

Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every other year