2012-2013 Academic Catalog

Apr 28, 2024

2012-2013 Academic Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

UDSC 257 - Utopian Visions, Urban Realities: Planning Cities for the 21st Century

Type of Course: Lecture, Discussion

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.